Art Quotes

I do love a good art quote.  My senior quote was by Georgia O’Keeffe (see first below).  Here are some favorites that speak to me:

• I found I could say things with shapes and colors I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for. –Georgia O’Keeffe
• Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence. –Friedrick Nietzsch
• Fine Art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. –John Ruskin
• Art is long, life is short (ars longa, vita brevis). –Hippocrates
• In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Art is the window to man’s soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within. –Claudia Lady Bird Johnson
• Sir, when their backsides look good enough to slap, there’s nothing more to do. –Peter Paul Rubens
• What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. –Augustus Saint-Gaudens
• Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. –Pablo Picasso
• Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. –Pablo Picasso
• A man throws himself out of the fourth-floor window: if you can’t make a sketch of him before he gets to the ground, you will never do anything big. –Eugene Delacroix
• How important are the visual arts in our society?  I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance.  Of course I could be prejudiced.  I am a visual art. –Kermit the Frog
• Art is not a thing.  It is a way. –Elbert Hubbard
• I put my heart and soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process. –Vincent Van Gogh
• You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use a work of art to see your soul. –George Bernard Shaw
• Pictures just come to my mind, and then I tell my heart to go ahead. –Horace Pippin
• Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thought seeking to understand the world and to make it understood. –Auguste Rodin
• The question is not what you look at, but what you see. –Henry David Thorough
• Each morning when I wake up, I experience again a supreme pleasure… that of being Salvador Dali. –Salvador Dali
• No art deserves to be above the life of its time.  No living people deserve to be beneath the art of their time.  If there is to be dancing, it must at least be what the living dreamed –William Saroyan
• Twelve photographs that matter in a year is a good crop for any photographer. –Ansel Adams
• Every canvas is a journey all its own. –Helen Frankenthaler
• Art is not taught.  What art is is taught. –John Wilde

Do you have any favorite art quotes?

Check this post for a few more art quotes.