Art and Inspiration Quotations by Artists with Their Art

While designing, developing and maintaining The Artistry of Jacques Pepin website, I was always coming across art and inspiration quotations. I began collecting them and, eventually, started to match them with the artists’ paintings. You can click through the thumbnails below to see them larger. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Graphic Design For The Artistry of Jacques Pepin

“Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye.. it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.” Edvard Munch

“There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.” Helen Frankenthaler

“Don’t be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation.” Paul Cezanne

“The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.” Vincent van Gogh

“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” Vincent van Gogh

“Art is a line around your thoughts.” Gustav Klimt

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Leonardo da Vinci

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” Georgia O’Keefe

“I shut my eyes in order to see.” Paul Gaugin

“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” Edward Hopper

“Great art picks up where nature ends.” Marc Chagall

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” Pablo Picasso

“The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature.” George Innes

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” Marc Chagall

“I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work.” Mary Cassat

“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” Auguste Rodin

“It is important to express oneself...provided the feelings are real and are taken from you own experience.” Berthe Morisot

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.” Georgia O’Keefe

“You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.” Pierre Auguste Renoir

“Creativity takes courage.” Henri Matisse

“I have a flood of ideas in my mind. I just follow my vision.” Yayoi Kusama

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas

“Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.” Rene Magritte

“To create one’s own world takes courage.” Georgia O’Keeffe

“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.” Claude Monet

“There is no must in art because art is free.” Wassily Kandinsky

“To my mind one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.” Paul Cezanne

“I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart” Vincent van Gogh

“Have no fear of perfection, you”ll never reach it.” Salvador Dali

“Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.” Edgar Degas

“In art, what we want is the certainty that one spark of original genius shall not be extinguished.” Mary Cassat

“The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.” Joan Miro

“Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.” Rembrandt van Rijn

“The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.” Vincent van Gogh

“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.” Piet Mondrian

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.” Pablo Picasso

“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.” James McNeill Whistler

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” Robert Henri

“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.” Paul Cezanne

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” Renee Magritte

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” Leonardo da Vinci

“I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum of all men.” Albrecht Durer

“Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” Claude Monet

“If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.” Albrecht Durer

“Every good painter paints what he is.” Jackson Pollock

Graphic Design: Paul Kazmercyk | Photography: Online Stock Images: iStockPhoto, 123RF, GraphicStock | Client: The Artistry of Jacques Pepin

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