Artists Quotes

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?”
― Shirley Graham Du Bois

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.

Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.

The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job.

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.

I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin.

The job is not the work.”
― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live in

“All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

[Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]”
― Robert Hughes

“All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
― James Baldwin

“When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.

That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.

Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does.

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.”
― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

“The loner who looks fabulous is one of the most vulnerable loners of all.”
― Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto

“We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.”
― Pablo Picasso

“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Netochka Nezvanova

“Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“creativity keeps the world alive, yet, everyday we are asked to be ashamed of honoring it, wanting to live our lives as artists. i’ve carried the shame of being a ‘creative’ since i came to the planet; have been asked to be something different, more, less my whole life. thank spirit, my wisdom is deeper than my shame, and i listened to who i was. i want to say to all the creatives who have been taught to believe who you are is not enough for this world, taught that a life of art will amount to nothing, know that who we are, and what we do is life. when we create, we are creating the world. remember this, and commit.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

“Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”
― Author-Poet Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

“It is the poets, artists, and musicians that will carry us through the pandemic attacks into a new reality. They are the ones who tell us how to navigate, breathe, feel, think, enjoy, and fully live our lives. (“Because the world had corona”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.”
― Vincent van Gogh