“There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life.”
John Constable
BeautyPerspective
Art Quotes
200 FAMOUS QUOTES · ART
Art Quotes
Read 200 of the best art quotes on creativity, painting, beauty and imagination from Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Rodin and more.
“Painting is but another word for feeling.”
John Constable
PaintingEmotion
“Nothing is denied to well-directed labour.”
Joshua Reynolds
Hard WorkPractice
“Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory.”
Joshua Reynolds
CreativityMemory
“The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.”
William Blake
ImaginationLife
“I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's.”
William Blake
OriginalityIndependence
“Practise is Art. If you leave off, you are Lost.”
William Blake
PracticeDiscipline
“All great Art is Praise.”
John Ruskin
GratitudeArt
“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.”
John Ruskin
ColourMind
“Art is a jealous mistress.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
DedicationArtists
“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.”
Henry David Thoreau
PerspectiveLife
“The artist has a twofold relation to nature; he is at once her master and her slave.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
NatureArtists
“Imitation is natural to man from childhood.”
Aristotle
ImitationLearning
“A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.”
Aristotle
StorytellingImagination
“As is painting, so is poetry.”
Horace
PaintingPoetry
“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.”
Henry James
LifeMeaning
“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
DisciplineWitty
“In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.”
Rabindranath Tagore
Self-ExpressionSoul
“What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.”
Rabindranath Tagore
CreativitySoul
“Art is a step from nature toward the Infinite.”
Kahlil Gibran
NatureInfinite
“What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.”
John Keats
ImaginationTruth
“Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
John Keats
CreativityMystery
“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
PoetryHappiness
“All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
William Wordsworth
PoetryEmotion
“Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple.”
Vitruvius
DesignProportion