Art and Creativity Quotes

"The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance."

"If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it."

"'Crazy' is a term of art; 'Insane' is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble."

"In art the best is good enough."

"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further."

"There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within."

"Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first."

"Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse."

"Pictures must not be too picturesque."

"When you master the art of being fully awake to this moment, you bestow a precious gift on your soul - the experience of love. Being present is the art of the soul."

"Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it."

"To put on a corset properly is as much of an art as to make a corset properly."

"Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced."

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."

"If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame."

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

"O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me."

"To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction."

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

"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."

"We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP."

"I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them."

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."

"Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?"

"The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature."

"The art of living well and the art of dying well are one."

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

"In art, at a certain level, there is no 'better than.' It's just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised."

"The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art."

"I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon."

"Art is essentially communication. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. That's why people make art, so other people can relate to it."

"Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art."

"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once."

"To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job."

"What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real."

"Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence."

"I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing."

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

"Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on."

"Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference."

"Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God."

"We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art."

"The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art."

"The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with."

"Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak."

"To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace."

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

"Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game."

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

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."