To be an artist, one must . . . never shirk from the truth as he understands it, never withdraw from life — Diego Rivera
Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises. — Gunter Grass
The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful. — George Bellows
The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination. — Marcel Duchamp
To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. — Rick Rubin
In my inner soul art and life are inseparable. — Eva Hesse
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it. — Robert Motherwell
Great artists suffer for the people. — Marvin Gaye
To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye. — Marvin Gaye
Art should be created for life, not for the museum — Jean Nouvel
Short Artists And Life Quotes
Art imitates life and, sometimes, life imitates art. It's a weird combination of elements. — Bruce Willis
I am an artist. I am here to live out loud. — Emile Zola
The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history. — Robert Rauschenberg
I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life. — Frank Stella
The richness of an artist is the fusion of influences that have shaped his life and work. — Fernando Botero
Top 10 Artists And Life Quotes
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing. — Georgia O'Keeffe
Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike. — Margot Fonteyn
As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see. — Diego Rivera
Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist. — Anais Nin
We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams. — Albert Einstein
To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love. — Marc Chagall
The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness. — Massimo Vignelli
You cut a hole in the building and people can look inside and see the way other people really lived.. it's making space without building it — Gordon Matta-Clark
When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. — Steve Jobs
For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and, if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over.
Art And Life Quotes
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. — Elie Wiesel
The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli
The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them. [...] Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due. — Winston Churchill
Never be a prisoner of your past. It was just a lesson, not a life sentence.
Don't pray for an easy life, pray to be a stronger man. — John F. Kennedy
Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented - which is what fear and anxiety do to a person - into something whole. — Louise Bourgeois
True karate is this: that in daily life one's mind and body be trained and developed in a spirit of humility, and that in critical times, one be devoted utterly to the cause of justice. — Gichin Funakoshi
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.
No one will hit you harder than life itself. It doesn't matter how hard you hit back. It's about how much you can take, and keep fighting, how much you can suffer and keep moving forward. That's how you win. — Sylvester Stallone
I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance. — George Balanchine
No matter how you may excel in the art of Karate, and in your scholastic endeavors, nothing is more important than your behavior and your humanity as observed in daily life. — Gichin Funakoshi
Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. — Malcolm Muggeridge
Art And Artists Quotes
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist — Francis of Assisi
People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. — Pablo Picasso
Some days I wish I could go back in life. Not to change anything, but to feel a few things twice.
People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly. — Banksy
Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss. — Banksy
The black artist is dangerous. Black art controls the 'Negro's' reality, negates negative influences, and creates positive images. — Sonia Sanchez
Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. — Banksy
Despite all the troubles of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was brought up or on man's hope in love. In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art–the colour of love — Marc Chagall
Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place. — Banksy
There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist. — Kara Walker
Artists And Creativity Quotes
There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence. — Massimo Vignelli
Sometimes you have to let everything go - purge yourself. If you are unhappy with anything - whatever is bringing you down - get rid of it. Because you will find that when you are free, your true creativity, your true self comes out. — Tina Turner
Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up and moving forward is a choice.
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity. — Alberto Giacometti
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels. — Francisco Goya
I'm not good at doing the same thing over and over again. — Akira Toriyama
The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure.
I wanted to change up the tempo and setting of my comics in the sense of giving them some variety, for one thing. — Akira Toriyama
Marc Jacobs, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen are innovators; fashion inventors; artists who create. — Bernard Arnault
You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity. — Banksy
A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense. — Bruno Munari
Artistic Life Quotes
The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows that she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins. — Joan D. Chittister
I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart. — Vincent Van Gogh
Make your life your art. It doesn't have to be that you're an artist. I know I talk about art a lot, but I mean a very broad thing with that. You could be a veterinarian, that's your art. Find your art; find your thing you love. — Gerard Way
Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life. Tip top if you must, but take the step.
Art alone makes life possible - this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms...
Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done. — Joseph Beuys
Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time. — Pablo Picasso
The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being. — Wassily Kandinsky
I would rather die of passion than of boredom. — Emile Zola
The goal is to commit to a structure that can take on a life of its own, instead of creating only one of the mood strikes. Or to start each day with the question of how and when you’re going to work on your art. — Rick Rubin
I look at the Samurai because they were the artists of their time. What I think struck me when I read Bushido is compassion. 'If there's no one there to help, go out and find someone to help.' That hit me, because I try to lead my life like that. — Tom Cruise
Being An Artist Quotes
An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose. — Langston Hughes
Writing graffiti is about the most honest way you can be an artist. It takes no money to do it, you don't need an education to understand it, and there's no admission fee. — Banksy
I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not the devil either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged. — Maria Callas
Don't wait for everything to be perfect before you decide to enjoy your life.
The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist! — Auguste Rodin
I think all those artists are artists who are appreciated because you believe their words and you appreciate their honesty in their music. If you don't appreciate the honesty in the music, the beat can be fly as hell but you'll never give an emcee props. — Talib Kweli
Be an artist of consciousness. Your picture of reality is your most important creation. Make it powerfully profoundly beautiful. — Alex Grey
Don't compare your life to others. There's no comparison between the sun and the moon. They shine when it's their time.
All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it. — Caspar David Friedrich
Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light. — Max Ernst
I'm an artist and that means I can be as egotistical as I want to be. — Lou Reed
After being taught sets and reps and working at it for a length of time you can't paint by numbers anymore. It must come from within. Any artist has an emotional contact with their work. A true bodybuilder doesn't just build muscle he creates muscle. You can't be a robot. — Tom Platz
Artists And Writers Quotes
Those who perceive in themselves... the artistic vocation as poet, writer, sculptor, painter, musician, and actor feel at the same time an obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it to service of their neighbour and the humanity as a whole. — Pope John Paul II
Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings. — Stevie Nicks
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. — Barbara Kingsolver
Life is like a piano, the white keys represent happiness and the black shows sadness, but as you go through life's journey, remember that the black keys also makes music.
Graffiti is like building a career. And there is a dialogue with the other artists out there mostly fellow writers because a lot of people who don't paint just see a blur when they look at it. — KAWS
The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth. — James Thurber
Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished. — Marie-Louise von Franz
Failure are part of life. If you don't fail, you don't learn. If you don't learn you'll never change.
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic. — Vivianne Crowley
If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death. — Steven Pressfield
Painting And Art Quotes
Bodybuilding is an art, your body is the canvas, weights are your brush and nutrition is your paint. We all have the ability to turn a self portrait into a masterpiece. — Kai Greene
Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint. — Banksy
You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it — Faith Ringgold
Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — Jean-Luc Godard
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — JeanLuc Godard
You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving. — Franz Kline
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker
You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. — Ansel Adams
I grew up hearing everyone tell me 'God loves you'. I would say big deal, God loves everybody. That don't make me special! That just proves that God ain't got no taste. And, I don't think He does. Thank God! Because He takes the junk of our lives and makes the most beautiful art. — Rich Mullins
When I got enough confidence, the stage was gone. When I was sure of losing, I won. When I needed people the most, they left me. When I learnt to dry my tears, I found a shoulder to cry on. And when I mastered the art of hating, somebody started loving me. — William Shakespeare
In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it. — Michelangelo
If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. — Meister Eckhart
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art. — Federico Garcia Lorca
Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice. — Erich Fromm
One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art. — Sally Mann
Everyone should consider his body as a priceless gift from one whom he loves above all, a marvelous work of art, of indescribable beauty, and mystery beyond human conception, and so delicate that a word, a breath, a look, nay, a thought may injure it. — Nikola Tesla
Music And Life Quotes
Judge not, before you judge yourself.
Judge not, if you're not ready for judgment.
The Road of life is rocky and you may stumble too,
so while you talk about me, someone else is judging you. — Bob Marley
We need to have music that contributes to the well-being of the spirit. Music that cradles people's lives and makes things a little easier. That's what I try to do, and what I want to do. You don't want to close the door on hope. — Merle Haggard
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. Improve the World Through Music. — Plato
Live for yourself and you will live in vain; Live for others, and you will live again. — Bob Marley
Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life. — Bob Marley
Life and love go on, let the music play. — Johnny Cash
You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it. — Jerry Garcia
Count your blessings. Once you realize how valuable you are and how much you have going for you, the smiles will return, the sun will break out, the music will play, and you will finally be able to move forward the life that God intended for you with grace, strength, courage, and confidence. — Og Mandino
Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music. — Sergei Rachmaninoff
But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last. — Prince
Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing. — Marc Chagall
The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts — D.T. Suzuki
A true architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist. They take a diverse number of stakeholders, extract needs, concerns, and dreams, then create a beautiful yet tangible solution that is loved by the users and the community at large. We create vessels in which life happens. — Cameron Sinclair
Technique does not constitute art. Nor is it a vague, fuzzy romantic quality known as ‘beauty,’ remote from the realities of everyday life. It is the depth and intensity of an artist’s experience that are the first importance in art. — Grant Wood
History shows us that the people who end up changing the world - the great political, social, scientific, technological, artistic, even sports revolutionaries - are always nuts, until they are right, and then they are geniuses. — John Eliot
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world. — Leonard Bernstein
I couldn't do country, with all due respect to all country music artists. My parents dressed me up with a cowboy hat and we'd go to the rodeo when I was younger and it traumatized me for life. — Chris Colfer
If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come. — Rick Rubin
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. — Oscar Wilde
The artist is always searching for the meaning of life, his own and that of mankind, searching for truth. A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanization and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music. — Bohuslav Martinu
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. — William Faulkner
I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time. — Banksy
There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be. — George Sheehan
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. — Edward Hopper
There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be. — George A. Sheehan
Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul? — Richard Corliss
I am tapping into a place in you that is unexplored, and very dangerous, but I think essential to the creative life of an artist. — Brandon Boyd
The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society. — Dana Gioia
I believe all artists, if they are not lying to themselves, must believe that the best part of their work, or even their life, is in front of them. To look only to the past and to say ‘those were the best years, when I was young’ is to say that in the future there is nothing. — Jan Saudek
To the artist He is the one altogether lovely, and to the educator He is the master teacher. To the philosopher He is the wisdom of God, and to the lonely He is a brother; to the sorrowful, a comforter to the bereaved, the resurrection and the life. And to the sinner he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin from the world. — John Gerstner
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. — Steve Jobs
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. — Henry James
I paint all the time. Each night I wrestle, I paint my face because I am an artist. It's kind of all coming together where I am able to do everything I really love to do and need in my life. — Jeff Hardy
If I were still stupider than I am, I should think myself at the apex of my career; yet I know how much I still lack, to reach perfection; I see it the more clearly now that I live only among first-rank artists and know what each one of them lacks. — Frederic Chopin
An unhurried mind brings the capacity to make wise choices every day - choices of how we use our time, of where we place our resources and our love. I am not just talking about avoiding the rat race, but about a life full of an artistic beauty - a life that has almost vanished from modern civilization, but is quite within the reach of everyone. — Eknath Easwaran
All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object. — Jean Renoir
Black life is ambiguous, and a kaleidoscope of meanings, rich, multi-sided . . . we have frozen our vision in figures that caricature, at best the complexity of our lives and leave the real artistic chore of interpretation unfinished. — Charles Bartlett Johnson
What attracted me was less art itself than the artist’s life and all that it meant for me: the idea of creativity and freedom of expression and action. I had been attracted to painting and drawing for a long time, but it was not an irresistible passion; what I wanted, at all costs, was to escape the monotony of life. — Pierre Bonnard
In Conclusion
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