Artists Sayings & Quotes
These artists sayings, quotes and quotations are from our famous and inspiring Just-Quotes collection.Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man. - James Thurber
We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end. - Nikki Giovanni
In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul. - John Fitzgerald Kennedy
I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within. - Louise Nevelson
I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle. In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing, not perfect. - Henry Moore
Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future. - James Graham Ballard
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere. - Guillaume Apollinaire
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. - Oscar Wilde
Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists. - John Le Carre
The best of artists hath no thought to show, which the rough stone in its superfluous shell, doth not include; to break the marble spell, is all the hand that serves the brain can do. - Michelangelo
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up. - Jean Cocteau
After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well. - Albert Einstein
The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself. - Michelangelo
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. - Roland Barthes
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. - Igor Stravinsky
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. - Dame Margot Fonteyn
I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists-neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are. - Stanley Kubrick
The best artists know what to leave out. - Charles De Lint
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. - William Seward Burroughs
I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists as it is very seductive and a little dangerous. - Queen Victoria
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. - John Steinbeck
Bad artists copy. Great artists steal. - Pablo Picasso
Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius. - Albert Pike
It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression. - Oscar Wilde