“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”
Oscar Wilde
IndividualityExpression
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.
“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.”
Oscar Wilde
UsefulnessWitty
“Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.”
Walter Pater
ExperienceLife
“Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.”
Leo Tolstoy
SoulHumanity
“Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
PurposeValue
“Beauty without expression tires.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
BeautyExpression
“Art is the mediator of the unspeakable.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
ExpressionMystery
“The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
GeniusTruth
“Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.”
Friedrich Schiller
NatureHumanity
“They say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.”
Plato
PoetsInspiration
“Art imitates nature.”
Aristotle
NatureImitation
“Let the work be what you will, provided it be simple and uniform.”
Horace
SimplicityUnity
“Painters and poets have always had an equal licence in bold invention.”
Horace
FreedomCreativity
“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.”
Alexander Pope
PracticeWriting
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
Samuel Johnson
WritingEffort
“There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face.”
William Shakespeare
AppearancesHuman Nature
“The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.”
William Shakespeare
PoetryImagination
“The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.”
William Shakespeare
TheatreNature
“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”
John Keats
PoetryNatural Talent
“Prose - words in their best order; poetry - the best words in the best order.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
PoetryWriting
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
PoetryBeauty
“The artist is the lover of Nature, therefore he is her slave and her master.”
Rabindranath Tagore
NatureArtists
“Never lose the first impression which has moved us.”
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
InspirationPainting
“Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
BeautyJoy
“What moves those of genius, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”
Eugène Delacroix
GeniusInspiration