Skip to content

Art Quotes

Artists themselves fill the top places, which is unusual. Monet leads, then Erich Fromm, Renoir, John Galsworthy and Berthe Morisot, so the page has a lot of painters talking about painting. For the theory side, Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1897) calls art a human activity whose purpose is to transmit the highest and best feelings to others, and Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), says that if the world were clear, art would not exist.

“I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream” is credited to Vincent van Gogh and flagged misattributed. The notes list early versions: a French form, “Je rêve mon tableau, et plus tard je peindrai mon rêve,” cited in a 1918 book, and English translations in the Musical Courier of 1908.

Random quote on Art

Most quoted on art:

You think you're doing something entirely your own, and a year later, you look at it and you see actually the roots of where your art comes from without your knowing it at all.

Marcel Duchamp Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)

To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our losses.

Joy Harjo

For Art is Nature made by Man
To Man the interpreter of God.

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

Being an artist is hard. Making the stuff and selling it. Both are impossible.

Rudy Rucker

You can do plain-air painting indoors, [remark to his pupil then, Berthe Morisot ] by painting white in the morning, lilac during the day and orange tones in the evening.

Édouard Manet

Lighten your palette.. [remark to the younger [ Paul Cezanne circa 1873, to encourage him to start using bright colors], ..paint only with the three primary colours and their derivatives.

Camille Pissarro

You can calculate]] the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it. (14 June 1853)

Gustave Flaubert

Impressionism is at the root of all modern art, because it was the first movement that managed to free itself from preconceived ideas, and because it changed not only the way life was depicted but the way life was seen.

Francesco Salvi

If you can't spontaneously detect (without analyzing) the difference between the sacred and profane, you'll never know what religion means. You will also never figure out what we commonly call art. You will never understand anything.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

In the far north, where humans must face the constant threat of starvation, where life is reduced to the bare essentials—it turns out that one of these essentials is art.

Peter Farb Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize,
And to be swift is less than to be wise.
'Tis more by art, than force of numerous strokes.

Homer

..the Impressionists are only.. ..makers of spots [of paint], and, what is more, spots stolen from the Japanese.

Edmond de Goncourt

In short, if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.

Virginia Woolf

[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man (1964)

While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Ray Bradbury his Preface to Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)

Art is long, and time is fleeting.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The heart desires,
The hand refrains,
The Godhead fires,
The soul attains.

William Morris

Seraphs share with thee
Knowledge; But Art, O Man, is thine alone!

Friedrich Schiller

Corot spoiled the 'étude' [sketch] we admired so much when we saw it at his home, by redoing it in the studio.

Berthe Morisot

People will keep on taking them [The French Impressionists] for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Related topics