Artists Quotes / Quotes About Artists

59 awesome artists quotes:

Every artist writes his own biography.
~Havelock Ellis

Anyone can be an artist in his or her field of endeavour if only they are passionate about their work.
~Bonnidette Lantz

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living, sooner than work at anything but his art.
~Bernard Shaw

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
~Simone de Beauvoir

Every artist was first an ametuer.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
~Eugene Delacroix

No Artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that the others are behind the time.
~Martha Graham

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in it’s true potential – the imagination.
~Lawrence Durrell

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
~Emile Zola

The progress of an artists is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
~T.S. Eliot

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
~James Baldwin

All men are creative but few are artists.
~Paul Goodman

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.
~Henry Miller

Judging your early artistic efforts is artistic abuse.
~Julia Cameron

The artist has a special task and duty; the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
~Lewis Mumford

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.
~Guillaume Apollinaire

All are artists, who are passionate about their work.
~Bonnidette Lantz

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
~Andre Gide

Bad artists always admire each others work.
~Oscar Wilde

The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.
~Pablo Picasso

Whatever an artist’s personal feeling are , as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical,. He acts from or upon other artists.
~Willem de Kooning

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.
~Max Jacob

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
~Henry Ward Beecher

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.
~Christian Nevell Bovee

Art is long, but artists are usually short – in funds.
~Unknown Author

The reason so many artists are poor is because there are so many poor artists.
~Unknown Author

His salary is what a commercial artist draws best.
~Unknown Author

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement changes after the fact.
~William S Burroughs

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.
~Raymond Chandler

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long Vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
~G.K. Chesterton

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give up.
~Cyril Connolly

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
~Cyril Connolly

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
~Joseph Conrad

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.
~William Faulkner

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling. Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
~William Faulkner

The artist must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
~Jean Cocteau

The artist does not illustrate science but he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.
~Lewis Mumford

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
~Max Eastman

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vise, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
~Ben Shahn

Artists, by definition innocent, don’t steal. But they do borrow without giving back.
~Ned Rorem

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
~Oscar Wilde

The scholar seeks, the artist finds.
~Andre Gide

Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.
~Eudora Welty

What is an artist, but the dregs of his work – the human shambles that follows it around.
~William Gaddis

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.
~Albert Camus

An artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child.
~Charles Burchfield

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
~H.L. Mencken

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
~Paul Valery

If you ask me what i came to do in this world, I , an artist, I will answer you: “I am here to live out loud.”
~Emile Zola

Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
~D.H. Lawrence

An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form.
~Hugh Murray Gibbon

An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himself with his art.
~Lee Simonson

It is not necessary for an artist to be crazy, but it helps.
~Unknown Author

The artist has never been a dictator, since he understands better than anybody else the variations in human personality.
~Heywood Broun

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
~George Santayana

An artist’s career always begins tomorrow.
~James McNeill Whistler

No great artist sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.
~Oscar Wilde

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