Art and Creativity Quotes

"Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction."

"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality."

"The art is long, life is short."

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

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

"Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less."

"Where thou art, that is home."

"Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death."

"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake."

"To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it."

"Art is about building a new foundation, not just laying something on top of what's already there."

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

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

"Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate."

"Rules and models destroy genius and art."

"Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty."

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize."

"Music happens to be an art form that transcends language."

"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."

"Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men."

"I always wanted to do things right and represent myself as somebody that took the art serious and someone that took the business serious also, so I had time to weigh the options and figure it out and do my best to create the situation that was ideal."

"With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft."

"It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found."

"It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function."

"I really do believe that art changes the landscape of the world."

"The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain."

"You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art."

"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form."

"Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art."

"Art is man's expression of his joy in labor."

"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."

"Art is to be free. Design is to fix."

"Art is not a pastime but a priesthood."

"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."

"My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see."

"Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality."

"All great art is born of the metropolis."

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

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

"The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above."

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

"Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries."

"It's clever, but is it Art?"

"Every artist was first an amateur."

"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital."

"I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few."

"We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question."

"All art is quite useless."

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."

"Trying to force creativity is never good."