Art Quotes and Sayings

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

The only rule in art is what works.

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down

Simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.

Looking is a gift, but seeing is a power.

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

Art does not reproduce what is visible; it makes things visible.

It is terrifying to think of what a commodity art has become.

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.

Art is a human activity which has as its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

Life is a work of art designed by the one who lives it.

Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.

There are two ways of disliking art. One is to dislike it. The other is to like it rationally.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.

There is no ‘must’ in art because art is free.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.

The function of art is to free the spirit of man and to invigorate and enlarge his vision.

Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

All art is solitary and the studio is a torture area.

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and commonsense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.

Art is a passion or it is nothing.

Creative minds have been known to survive any sort of bad training.

Art is what you can get away with.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it.

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.

Criticism is easy, art is difficult.

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Precision is not reality.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.