Top 100 Quotes About The Artist
#1. Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.
John Cage
#2. I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.
Friedrich Schiller
#3. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.
Flannery O'Connor
#4. The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.
Eric Maisel
#5. The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.
E. E. Cummings
#6. The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious ...
Oscar Wilde
#7. In Nirvana, it is you, my friend, who goes away. You take an eraser and erase yourself. It's like the Road Runner cartoons where in the middle of the cartoon, the hand of the artist appears on the screen and erases the Road Runner.
Frederick Lenz
#8. It is not enough that the artist should be well prepared for the public. The public must be well prepared for what it is going to hear.
Hector Berlioz
#9. Your thoughts are like the artist's brush. They create a personal picture of the reality you live in.
Sydney Banks
#10. Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#11. If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul.
Auguste Rodin
#12. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
Henry Miller
#13. Life and mind are continuously in conflict with each other. I want happiness, security. I won't reach that by considerations of my mind; on the contrary they will lead to a certain despair of the inner person. Not what he thinks engages the artist, but what he feels.
Bram Van Velde
#15. The artist alone among men knows what true humility means. His reach forever exceeds his grasp. He can never be satisfied with his work. He knows when he has done well, but he knows he has never attained his dream. He knows he never can.
Rheta Childe Dorr
#16. Creativity is not linear, just like the earth is not flat ... If you keep going long enough you will always get back to where you started from. That is when you have lived a full life. That is the artist's path.
Nikki Sixx
#17. The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity.
Tom Wolfe
#18. I was given the gifts of the artist, and the trouble that goes with them: So I have that blessing, and there was never a time thatI questioned it or doubted it ... For forty years, I wanted to jump out of windows.
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
#19. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul.
Richard Ellmann
#20. The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature ... the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
H.L. Mencken
#21. Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Henry James
#22. That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to ... grapple with the unfamiliar.
Brian Aldiss
#23. The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
John Updike
#24. It would be bypassing the issue to say that the artist's business is to work with this and that material or manipulate the findings of perceptual psychology, and that the rest should be left to other professions.
Hans Haacke
#25. The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say - himself.
Minor White
#26. The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.
Bernard Berenson
#27. The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.
Paul Cezanne
#28. I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.
Malcolm Wilson
#29. There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
Emile Zola
#30. The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.
Romare Bearden
#31. Why should I deem myself to be a chisel, when I could be the artist?
Friedrich Schiller
#33. As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.
Taiye Selasi
#34. The artist doesn't really think about consequences - he or she does the work, stands back and looks at and thinks, 'Hmm, that could have worked better like this.' But as a person who needs to sell tickets to do the next work, one needs to analyze how it does or does not hit its mark.
Twyla Tharp
#35. Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.
Alma Gluck
#36. The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#37. If our ballets be feeble, monotonous and dull, if they be devoid of ideas, meaning, expression and character, it is less the fault of the art than that of the artist.
Jean-Georges Noverre
#38. Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
Leo Tolstoy
#39. Nature is simply the opportunity for the artist to express himself.
Gustave Moreau
#40. Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real.
Burton Raffel
#41. If a writer, despite his natural gifts, gives up writing because no one will publish him, then he is no writer. The artist is distinguished by his urge to create, which by very definition is a concomitant of talent.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#42. The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life ... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.
W. Somerset Maugham
#44. The market follows the artist. The artist does not follow the market.
Iimani David
#45. The frame is the reward of the artist.
Edgar Degas
#46. Art is a war - between ourselves and the forces of self-sabotage that would stop us from doing our work. The artist is a warrior.
Steven Pressfield
#47. The original 'Artist's Way' focused on the nurturing of the self. The 'Artist's Way for Parents' focuses both on nurturing the self and nurturing the children in our care.
Julia Cameron
#48. The artist always has been and still is a being somewhat apart from the rest of humanity.
Beatrice M. Hinkle
#49. There ought to be only one large art warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his art-works and from which he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is one must be half a tradesman.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#50. All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.
Paul Klee
#51. The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.
Sean O Faolain
#52. In Germany, a certain artistic sense is fairly common, but the artist's sense is foreign there.
Franz Grillparzer
#53. Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?
Robert Adams
#54. In America it's a particular problem. The artist, particularly the poet, is just unacknowledged; if I can use that dumb word. Maybe it has always been that way. Maybe the only way he or she can be acknowledged is to be connected with some movement, be it religious or political.
Gerald Stern
#55. The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination.
Romare Bearden
#56. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.
Carl Sagan
#57. The fact that all of us die anyway (the rumor turns out to be true) is a mere detail in the celestial glow of imagination. The artist's eyes destroy death.
Herbert Gold
#59. I'm convinced that, in the end, art is not for the artist but for their fellow man.
George Rickey
#60. The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people.
Amiri Baraka
#61. The artist is chosen by God to fulfill his commands and must never be overwhelmed by public opinion.
Albrecht Durer
#62. Every master knows that the material teaches the artist.
Ilya Ehrenburg
#63. A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.
Jane Harrison
#64. When we think of Leonardo da Vinci, the last thing that comes to mind is the nationality of the artist. The great masters belong to the world.
Igor Babailov
#65. The artist can not serve his struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates the social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.
Leon Trotsky
#66. Dissatisfaction with one's self and dissatisfaction with the world - is necessary - it is one of the prime things that keeps the artist going on - that drives him - happiness, as such, must come in between times, as best it can.
Clarence John Laughlin
#67. I've never read a screenplay in advance. You trust the artist.
Beatrice Dalle
#68. Music tells you about the artist and what they were thinking about at the time, because the person has to think about it to sing it.
Sean Paul
#69. I get up around 7 a.m. That's very early for a stand-up comic. Then I'll have breakfast with my husband, the artist Al Ridenour, take my three dogs for a walk and commence with my work.
Margaret Cho
#70. The artist's business is to feel, although he may think a little sometimes ... when he has nothing better to do.
John Ruskin
#71. For instance, in The Artist's Way, her influential book about cultivating creativity, Julia Cameron suggests scheduling an artist's date,
Gretchen Rubin
#72. The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.
Lucian Freud
#73. The artist looks for a subject. You know, a lot of new poets don't seem to have a subject. I don't totally understand that.
Gerald Stern
#74. Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That's really where the work of the artist begins.
Lewis Baltz
#75. A good producer brings out the best in the artist he's working with. You shouldn't be able to listen to something and say, 'So-and-so produced this album.'
Eddie Van Halen
#76. The damnable thing about bad art is that the insincerity which lies at its roots is not perceived by the artist himself.
Quentin Bell
#77. The artist enriches the soul of humanity.
The artist delights people with
a thousand different shades of feeling.
Auguste Rodin
#78. It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.
C.A. Dawson Scott
#79. The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
Marcel Proust
#80. The artist Paul Klee described drawing a picture as taking a line for a walk. I have borrowed his words to explain my approach to writing; when I write a novel it is like I am taking a thought for a walk.
Aminatta Forna
#81. Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.
Havelock Ellis
#82. The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.
Henri Matisse
#83. I'm for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them the individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It's really tragic.
Marilyn Monroe
#84. The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.
Gustave Flaubert
#85. It is necessary for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect ... periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation.
Rollo May
#86. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
Robert Hughes
#87. I think the popular concept of the artist is a person who has this great passion and enthusiasm and super emotion. He just throws himself into this great masterpiece and collapses from exhaustion when it's finished. It's really not that way at all.
Richard Estes
#88. The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.
Andre Malraux
#89. The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.
Andre Malraux
#90. The more the public is interested in artists, the less it is interested in art. The personality of the artist is not a thing the public should know about. It is too accidental.
Oscar Wilde
#92. Nature was one of the key forces that brought me back to God, for I wanted to know the Artist responsible for beauty such as I saw on grand scale in photos from space telescopes or on minute scale such as in the intricate designs on a butterfly wing.
Philip Yancey
#93. Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.
Franz Kafka
#94. That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.
Lukas Foss
#95. The Artist should not forget his mission, perhaps the most religious of all, of sustaining faith in the worthwhileness of art and thus of life.
Ernst Bacon
#96. In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.
Marcel Duchamp
#97. The God who impoverished himself is also the God of abundance, and somehow, perhaps at times nonsensically, Christians are called to live out of an ethic not of scarcity but of abundance - an abundance that extends both to the homeless neighbor and to the artist neighbor. . .
Lauren Winner
#98. I have been the artist with the longest career, and I am so proud and honored to be chosen from heaven to be invincible.
Michael Jackson
#99. the artist can never quite get on terms with God, who as far as creation goes has got there first and pulled off a product hard to beat.
Terry Eagleton
#100. The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.
Oscar Wilde
