Check out our list of painting quotes for artists, painters and creatives. Get inspired to create your next beautiful painting!
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“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”
Pablo Picasso
“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
Vincent Willem van Gogh
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
Banksy
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
Vincent Willem van Gogh
“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”
Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”
Edward Hopper
“Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.”
Pablo Picasso
“A fine work of art – music, dance, painting, story – has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.”
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
“The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they’re always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.”
Norman Rockwell
“There is something beautiful about a blank canvas, the nothingness of the beginning that is so simple and breathtakingly pure. It’s the paint that changes its meaning and the hand that creates the story. Every piece begins the same, but in the end they are all uniquely different.”
Piper Payne
“A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people”
Edgar Degas
“Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.”
Banksy, Wall and Piece
“Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.”
Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn
“To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing– what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.”
Gerhard Richter
“…Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all – my head is bursting…”
Claude Monet
“I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.”
Miguel De Cervantes
“I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.”
O. Henry, The Complete Works of O. Henry
“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Life is like canvas and when you die you have to sign the bottom corner. Will you be happy with what the painting looks like?”
Lizabeth Zindel
“All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.”
Bob Ross
“Once I have entered this land, all the beauty in the world becomes a part of my being. Without even touching a canvas, I become a first-class painter.”
Catherine Meurisse, La jeune femme et la mer
“Even grey has a shade of happiness.”
Anthony T. Hincks
“All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?”
Banksy, Wall and Piece
“A great painter forces the world to see nature as he sees it….We paint from within outwards.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
“If you want to leave the real world and enter a beautiful oil painting or an interesting novel, then you have not been able to enrich your world in the real world!”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“Life, like a good painting, needs balance, a harmonious arrangement to avoid being chaotic, a mess, a failure.”
Iain Pears
“There is nothing more prestigious then a beautiful soul painting the world with his or her vibrant colors”
Ms. Bonnie Zackson Koury
“You’ll never end up in a museum if you spend your whole life painting fences.”
Connor Chalfant
“One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness, which nevertheless has light in it.”
Van Gogh, Cartas a Théo
“You have to know how to be vulgar. Paint with four-letter words.”
Pablo Picasso
“To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! … Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!”
Henry Miller, To Paint Is To Love Again
“They ran to the museums for paintings. I ran to the roof for sunsets”
Darnell Lamont Walker
“Painting is silent poetry,
Plutarch
and poetry is painting that speaks.”
“It’s with my brush that I make love.”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
“The painter knew that color was not something you controlled but something you set free. He believed that color knew its way home.”
Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Waking Up at Rembrandt’s
“In the corner of the painting of success
Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum
the signature is blurred”
“To live is to paint, it is to create; but while we are painting, we are being painted, being created as well!”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“A painting shouldn’t be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.”
Amit Kalantri
“Having the right brush does not mean you will make the right painting.”
Catherine Meurisse, La jeune femme et la mer
“My hands are flowing like sunlight. The shapes and colors are astounding. I don’t understand these images that are empowering me. My brush touches the canvas like photons to the earth, and a new world develops, free from my control, yet intrinsically dependent upon me. I am sweating with elation. I have no idea what I am doing, or what it is my hands are trying to see. There is so much strength in this clarity I am overpowered by the independence of it.”
Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness
“Painting has to do with knocking yourself out day after day trying to get what you want to down on canvas. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t, but every day you try. That’s what painting is.”
Zibby Oneal, In Summer Light
“I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.”
Zdzisław Beksiński
“Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.”
Hermann Hesse
“Painting is a great outlet for those inner emotions you cannot get out any other way.”
Carol Brearley
“Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.”
Banksy, Wall and Piece
