John Ruskin

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Elbert Hubbard

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

Andy Warhol

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Ambrose Bierce

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

Fran Lebowitz

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

Henry Ward Beecher

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Andy Warhol

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Abraham Lincoln

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Anatole France

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

Paul Valery

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Pablo Picasso

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

George Bernard Shaw

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Oscar Wilde

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Edgar Degas

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Michelangelo

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

Gertrude Stein

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Dorothea Lange

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

Andre Gide

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Khalil Gibran

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

Carl Rogers

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Albert Einstein

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

Anais Nin

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Georgia O'Keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

Henry David Thoreau

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Ansel Adams

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist was first an amateur.

Twyla Tharp

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

James Whistler

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Thomas Merton

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Charles Horton Cooley

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

Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Albert Camus

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Oscar Wilde

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Napoleon Bonaparte

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Aristotle

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.