Inspiring Art Quotes

Benjamin Constant:

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. [1804]

Carl Jung:

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

Daniel Barenboim:

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Jean de La Bruyere:

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence.

Julia Cameron:

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite -- getting something down.

Magdalena Abakanowicz:

Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.

Oscar Levant:

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Wilde:

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

 
Pablo Picasso: 

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Pablo Picasso:

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

William S. Burroughs:

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.