“Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.”
Oscar Wilde
CriticismOriginality
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.
“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”
Oscar Wilde
PoetryWitty
“The artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
CultureArtists
“Art is the path of the creator to his work.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
CreativityProcess
“There is no surer way of evading the world than by Art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by Art.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
EscapeConnection
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
GeniusTalent
“Poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history.”
Aristotle
PoetryPhilosophy
“You will express yourself well if a clever arrangement makes a familiar word new.”
Horace
WritingOriginality
“The mountains will be in labour, and a ridiculous mouse will be born.”
Horace
ExpectationsWitty
“All art is but imitation of nature.”
Seneca
NatureImitation
“No day without a line.”
Pliny the Elder
PracticeDiscipline
“Let the cobbler stick to his last.”
Apelles
CriticismExpertise
“A little learning is a dang'rous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”
Alexander Pope
LearningKnowledge
“Classic. A book which people praise and don't read.”
Mark Twain
BooksFunny
“Poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
William Wordsworth
PoetryEmotion
“That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
ImaginationStorytelling
“We're made so that we love first when we see them painted, things we have passed perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.”
Robert Browning
PerceptionPainting
“The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.”
Wassily Kandinsky
MeaningForm
“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.”
Wassily Kandinsky
ColourSoul
“Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.”
Edgar Degas
MasteryWitty
“There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.”
Édouard Manet
ColourNature
“Show me an angel and I will paint one.”
Gustave Courbet
RealismPainting
“The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.”
Eugène Delacroix
PerfectionismFocus
“Drawing is the probity of art.”
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
DrawingIntegrity
“Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.”
Victor Hugo
GeniusInfinite