Top 100 Free Art Quotes
#1. I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#2. You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.
Jessa Crispin
#3. Art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.
Pablo Picasso
#4. O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul that, struggling to be free, art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay! Bow, stubborn knees! and, heart with strings of steel, be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!
William Shakespeare
#5. Mrs. Nixon and I share the sorrow of millions of Americans at the death of Louis Armstrong. One of the architects of an American art form, a free and individual spirit, and an artist of worldwide fame, his great talents and magnificent spirit added richness and pleasure to all our lives.
Richard M. Nixon
#6. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#8. I drew a picture on the back of a calendar in pencil. In those days they used to give out free calendars, I had no art paper, so I took whatever else I could.
Joe Shuster
#9. ... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free!
Paul Lockhart
#10. If the whole world I once could see On free soil stand, with the people free Then to the moment might I say, Linger awhile ... so fair thou art.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#11. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be a vehicle for self-conscious evangelism. Christians ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. The Christian is the really free man. He is free to have imagination.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#13. What wonders does not wine! It discloses secrets; ratifies and confirms our hopes; thrusts the coward forth to battle; eases the anxious mind of its burden; instructs in arts. Whom has not a cheerful glass made eloquent! Whom not quite free and easy from pinching poverty!
Horace
#14. Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
Langston Hughes
#15. Becoming a fashion designer is agreeing with the fact that what you experience or what you see as free is also connected to a system. Does that mean giving up your freedom? I still don't know the answer. There's a very different kind of psychology going on in the fashion scene than in art.
Raf Simons
#16. Art makes murder into the supreme image of Beauty and in doing so sets free the vengeful God. (referring to Jean Lorrain's LE VICE ERRANT)
Jennifer Birkett
#17. You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes everyday - unless you're too busy; then you should sit for an hour.
Sukhraj S. Dhillon
#18. Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.
John F. Kennedy
#19. Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.
Robert Henri
#21. In this kind of super-capitalistic society, everything is turned into money. And one of the great things about art is it isn't worth anything. It's absolutely free. It's going to get made no matter what.
Brice Marden
#22. Children do not need half a dozen sports, music, art, or theater activities. Kids actually need more free playtime without adult instruction.
Laura Schlessinger
#23. The main problem is to free your mind when you play. I find that in my own playing, whenever I feel any kind of tension, I'm restricted to playing the most fundamental kinds of things.
Art Farmer
#24. The creative mind can turn chaos into a master piece and call it Art.
Nikki Rowe
#25. We see this tendency to throw off restraints in life, in art - it's an inglorious gesture of thumbing the nose - it makes me laugh ...
John Geddes
#26. The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.
Seth Godin
#27. People think you can get out your canvas and paint any time you have a free moment. You can't. Commercial art and painting are entirely different. Painting takes a different mental approach. You have to get the right attitude, the right mood.
Pierre Alechinsky
#28. Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose - to accept defeat. To learn to die is to be liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes you must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying!
Bruce Lee
#29. Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art ...
Robert Henri
#30. An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
Willem De Kooning
#31. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.
Carl Jung
#32. The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.
Immanuel Kant
#33. Artists, by their free expressions, encourage others to be free. This is the quality that makes works of art enduring.
Marty Rubin
#34. Don't keep your Muse locked up in the closet. Set them free to dance across the page and what they create will be a masterpiece.
Michelle C. Hillstrom
#35. The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.
RZA
#36. My art side is free and there are no strings attached.
Swizz Beatz
#37. Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
William Carlos Williams
#38. Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free; from our fears and sins release us; let us find our rest in thee. Israel's strength and consolation, hope of all the earth thou art, dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart.
Charles Wesley
#39. To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom.
Joseph Beuys
#40. Judo should be free as art and science from any external influences, political, national, racial, and financial or any other organized interest. And all things connected with it should be directed to its ultimate object, the benefit of Humanity
Kano Jigoro
#41. Truants like you should understand art. The way to free y'rself from any system of control is to do something useless.
Rob Davis
#42. What is your real work? Is it that which pays the bills or is it your art? I think your real work is healing. Whatever helps you become more loving in this lifetime. Whatever helps you forgive yourself, embrace yourself, meet yourself, and free yourself in this lifetime.
Tama J. Kieves
#43. When a stock doubles, sell half - then what you have is a free position. Then it becomes more of an art form. When you sell depends on individual circumstances.
Peter Cundill
#44. Information is nutrition, knowledge is nutrition, art is nutrition and they set us free. Internet is a great library, great library is a freedom within wisdom in this digital age
Baris Gencel
#45. It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.
W. H. Auden
#46. Don't think too much. You'll create a problem that wasn't even there in the first place.
Sukhraj S. Dhillon
#47. Among men who are really free, every form of industry becomes more rapidly improved - all the arts flourish more gracefully - all the sciences extend their range.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#48. Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#49. The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves ... The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.
Harold Bloom
#50. You're free to do anything you want with your company. It's more like art. You don't have to follow any norms. It's an expression of how you feel the world should be. When you make a company, that's your little place to make your own little utopia.
Derek Sivers
#51. When I close my eyes, my imagination roams free. In the same way I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself. I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within
Pipilotti Rist
#52. I'm free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don't try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don't compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.
Erykah Badu
#53. Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#54. ...among whom the art of living well and getting the most out of life at a moderate expense has been attained to a very high degree.
Maria Gentile
#55. The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination
Danielle M. Maistry
#56. We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.
Henri Bergson
#57. Thus I had already reached the conclusion that we are in no wise free in the presence of a work of art, that we do not create it as we please but that it pre-exists in us and we are compelled as though it were a law of nature to discover it because it is at once hidden from us and necessary.
Marcel Proust
#58. There are so many things in the world - in the cities - so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.
Philip Guston
#59. Art is the free expression of the artist and they tried to stop us from expressing ourselves, our art.
Marilyn Manson
#60. What is full of redundancy or formula is predictably boring. What is free of all structure or discipline is randomly boring. In between lies art.
Wendy Carlos
#61. Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others' choices make us.
Richie Norton
#62. 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
#63. WORDS SHLD BE FREE. RELEASE THEM FROM THEIR SENTENCES.
Amy King
#64. So, verily, with every difficulty, there is relief;
Verily, with every difficulty there is relief.
Therefore, when thou art free (from thine immediate task), still labour hard,
And to thy Lord turn [all] thy attention.
Anonymous
#65. I wish to lead a life free from care, and I see that I shall be unhappy if I cannot always work at my art.
Clara Schumann
#66. Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.
George Santayana
#67. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Stephen King
#68. Freedom of speech is, to all Americans, as oxygen is to the human condition. It is a right that has been irreversibly programmed into our hard drive. We are free to speak our minds. An artist's right to express him or herself as best suits their art, is the artist's prerogative and it is guaranteed.
John C. McGinley
#69. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#70. Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#71. Abolish music prejudices. Form opinions and love music for itself, not its genre, performer(s) or popularity status.
Abigail Biddinger
#72. All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man
Bernard Berenson
#73. I don't know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.
Banksy
#74. The art of making True promises within ones ownself is termed as Will (Sankalp) ... for beginners (like me) it is a tough learning and for siddhas; they just become that way ... effortlessly they sail ...
Dinesh Kumar
#75. Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.
Damien Hirst
#76. To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.
Walter Darby Bannard
#77. Sketching is the breath of art: it is the most refreshing of all the more impulsive forms of creative self-expression and, as such, it should be as free, and happy, as a song in the bath.
Mervyn Levy
#78. Resolve, and thou art free. But breathe the air
Of mountains, and their unapproachable summits
Will lift thee to the level of themselves.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#79. I love art dealers. In some ways, they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is, create their own aesthetic universes, support artists, employ people, and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.
Jerry Saltz
#80. 'Stimela' is the very first video I directed. I wanted it to be an emotional visual art piece, displaying humans as free, powerful animals. We are all running from something or searching for something; our instincts have been ignored.
Wynter Gordon
#81. The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.
Ken Burns
#82. I think in America there's this free flow between fashion, art, architecture, music and design. In Europe, it's more segregated between those different disciplines, I think.
Marco Brambilla
#83. She is unapologetic
She is wild with her heart
She is free
She is art
Though some can't figure her out
She's an incredible mess
That's just how she likes it.
Jasmine Sandozz
#84. This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.
Walt Whitman
#85. If you follow nature you will not be able to vanquish the tragic in any real degree in your art ... We must free ourselves from our attachment to the external, for only then do we transcend the tragic, and are enabled consciously to contemplate the repose which is within all things.
Piet Mondrian
#86. Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.
Donald Judd
#87. Arts are what free and thriving people do with their time after their critical needs have been met.
Mark Noble
#88. As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty.
W. H. Auden
#89. You break through the veil whenever you strap on a sword or chant the ancient verses. You escape when you write a poem or a tale that brings beauty into the world. You are set free whenever you love - even those who believe you're crazy.
Jef Murray
#90. Only a free hand can draw a free line.
Marty Rubin
#91. When nothing else worked, we created a holistic, hand-tailored program that saved Pax's life. At Passages, he and I use what we learned in curing him to help other discover the roots of their addiction or alcoholism and break free.
Chris Prentiss
#92. Artists are free to push boundaries to make art. But when pushing boundaries is their only aim, the result is usually bad art.
Jane Lynch
#93. I never thought that I would support myself with art - everyone in the Group of Seven had day jobs. I became a geography teacher so that I could get free field trips into the wilderness to paint.
Robert Bateman
#94. Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense; the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they're 100% personal.
Chris Ware
#95. By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.
Angelus Silesius
#96. Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#97. In our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
Milan Kundera
#98. You can kill people with sound. And if you can kill, then maybe there is also the sound that is opposite of killing. And the distance between these two points is very big. And you are free
you can choose. In art everything is possible, but everything is not necessary.
Arvo Part
#99. Art is free, but of course you have to be alert to catch it when it comes onto the canvas. I don't choose the ideas, they choose me. I don't wait for them. They come without my permission!
Mirka Mora
#100. Since German reunification in 1990, historians and researchers have been free to work in the East, where the lost Nazi art collection disappeared.
Stephen Kinzer
