Famous Art Quotes
 
A German officer visited Pablo Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist (chaos») of the painting, asked Picasso: “Did you do this?” Picasso calmly replied: “No, you did this!” 
- Slavoj Zizek
 
“Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, “Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.” 
- Marina Abramovic
 
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
- Aristotle
 
"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."
- George Bernard Shaw
 
“Painting is a poem without words.”
- Horace
 
"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." 
- Pablo Picasso
 
“What do you think an artist is? He is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” 
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” 
- Pablo Picasso
 
“One must act in painting as in life, directly.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Everything you can imagine is real.” 
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
"If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!" 
- Pablo Picasso
 
"The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?" 
- Pablo Picasso
 
"We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell." 
- Pablo Picasso
 
"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them." 
- Pablo Picasso
 
“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing” 
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Give me a museum and I'll fill it.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, he just goes on trying other things.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“I don’t say everything, but I can paint them.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“I don’t seek. I find.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
"Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can never learn how to paint." 
- Pablo Picasso
 
"Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy." 
- Pablo Picasso
 
"Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree. While ago, Gertrude Stein joyfully claimed that he understood what my painting was trying to emphasize. According to Stein, there were 3 musicians. But the painting was a still-life!”” 
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.”
- Pablo Picasso
 
“Color is to the eye what music is to the ear.”
- Louis Comfort Tiffany
 
“One eye sees, the other feels.”
- Paul Klee
 
“Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.”
- Paul Klee
 
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.”
- Georgia O'Keeffe
 
“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”
- Georgia O'Keeffe
 
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
- Thomas Merton
 
“I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.”
- Jackson Pollock
 
“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.”
- Jackson Pollock
 
“When I say artist I mean the one who is building things … some with a brush – some with a shovel – some choose a pen.” 
- Jackson Pollock
 
“Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.”
- Edgar Degas
 
“In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.”
- Edgar Degas
 
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” 
- Edgar Degas
 
“Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.”
- Edgar Degas
 
“Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.”
- Edgar Degas
 
“One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.”
- Edgar Degas
 
“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.”
- Edgar Degas
 
“When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.”
- Agnes Martin
 
“Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.”
- Giotto di Bondone
 
“When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”
- Paul Cezanne
 
“Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.”
- Paul Cezanne
 
“Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven’t.”
- Paul Cezanne
 
“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”
- Leo Tolstoy
 
“Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”
- Leo Tolstoy
 
“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.”
- Leo Tolstoy
 
“The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.”
- Leo Tolstoy
 
“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
- Leo Tolstoy
 
“Art must destroy violence, only it can do it.”
- Leo Tolstoy
 
“Every artist was first an amateur.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
“A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.”
- Joshua Reynolds
 
“My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.”
- J. Paul Getty
 
“I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”
- Andy Warhol
 
“I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money.”
- Andy Warhol
 
“Art is what you can get away with.” 
- Andy Warhol
 
“The work of art is a scream of freedom.”
- Christo
 
“Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.” 
- Salvador Dalí
 
“There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“I don't do drugs. I am drugs.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“It is easy to become a good painter. There are only conditions. First, you must be Spanish. Second, your name must be Salvador Dali.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“Be mad.”
- Salvador Dali
 
“When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.”
- Ellen Key
 
“The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.”
- Ellen Key
 
“Art is the daughter of freedom.”
- Friedrich Schiller
 
“No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.”
- Friedrich Schiller
 
“If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.” 
- Friedrich Schiller
 
“Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.”
- Friedrich Schiller
 
“To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.”
- Robert Schumann
 
“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.”
- J. D. Salinger
 
“Art is not a thing; it is a way.”
- Elbert Hubbard
 
“Great art picks up where nature ends.”
- Marc Chagall
 
“Great art picks up where nature ends.” 
- Marc Chagall
 
“The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.”
- Marc Chagall
 
“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.”
- John Ruskin
 
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.”
- Albert Einstein
 
“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.” 
- Albert Einstein
 
“Rules and models destroy genius and art.”
- William Hazlitt
 
“Of all lies, art is the least untrue.”
- Gustave Flaubert
 
“I will preach with my brush.”
- Henry Ossawa Tanner
 
“Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer
 
“With Art, only talent counts.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer
 
“In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.”
- Damien Hirst
 
“I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.”
- Damien Hirst
 
“I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So far I've found there aren't any. I just wanted to be stopped, and no one will stop me.”

- Damien Hirst
 
“The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.”
- Hendrik Willem Van Loon
 
“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.”
- Vincent Van Gogh
 
"If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced." 
- Vincent van Gogh
 
"The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting." 
- Vincent van Gogh
 
"I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture." 
- Vincent van Gogh
 
“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
- E. O. Wilson
 
“The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.”
- Norman Rockwell
 
“It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.”
- Tom Stoppard
 
“Painting completed my life.”
- Frida Kahlo
 
"I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration." 
- Frida Kahlo
 
"I paint flowers so they will not die." 
- Frida Kahlo
 
"They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." 
- Frida Kahlo