85 Inspiring Quotes About Art For Kids

A kid doing some arts

Image: Midjourney/ MomJunction Design Team

Inspire and encourage your children to try their hands on some creative activities like painting, drawing, or crafting. These activities enable them to develop fine motor skills, enhance creativity, and promote emotional expression. We bring you a collection of art quotes for kids to help you give them a push. These will make them understand that art and crafts is a fascinating and creative process that brings their imagination and creative thoughts to life. Also, it may help your children to understand themselves better.

In This Article

80+ Art Quotes For Kids

These quotes cover themes of creativity, self-discovery, and inspiration, fostering a deeper knowledge of art’s role in personal expression. Inspire your children to become like their favorite artists. Share these art quotes by popular artists and ignite your child’s passion.

  1. “Painting from nature is not copying the object, it’s realising one’s sensations.” –Paul Cezanne

  1. “Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.” –Donatella Versace
  1. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” –Pablo Picasso
  1. “A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.” –Elaine de Kooning
  1. “No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” –Oscar Wilde
  1. “Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” –Claude Monet
  1. “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint’, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” –Vincent Van Gogh
  1. “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time, it’s just that others are behind the times.” –Martha Graham
  1. “There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.” –Pablo Picasso

  1. Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” –Jackson Pollock
  1. “What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.” –Eugene Delacroix
  1. “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” – Marc Chagall
  1. “There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.” –Charlie Chaplin
  1. “Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?” –Pablo Picasso
  1. “I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.” –Henri Matisse
  1. “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.” –Edgar Degas
  1. “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
  1. “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” –Edward Hopper

  1. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” –Thomas Merton
  1. “I just feel that I’m in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I’m in the process of working.” –Louise Nevelson
  1. “Art must be life — it must belong to everybody.” –Marina Abramović
  1. “More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.” –Joan Miró
  1. “There is no must in art because art is free.” –Wassily Kandinsky
  1. “An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.” –James McNeill Whistler
  1. “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  1. “What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” –Karl Lagerfeld
  1. “To my mind a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.” –Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  1. “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.” –James Mcneill Whistler
  1. “What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.”–Auguste Rodin
  1. “Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.” –Roy Lichtenstein
  1. “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” –C.S. Lewis
  1. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science” – Albert Einstein
  1. “The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” –Alberto Giacometti
  1. “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” –Francis Bacon
  1. “I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.” –Frida Kahlo
  1. “When I feel a little confused the only thing to do is to turn back to the study of nature before launching once again into the subjects closest to heart.” –Raoul Dufy

  1. “In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece.” –Kai Greene
  1. “When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”” –Michael J. Strauss
  1. “To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.” –Giorgio de Chirico
  1. “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” –Albert Einstein
  1. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” –Steve Jobs
  1. “Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” –Camille Pissarro
  1. “I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.” – William Morris
  1. “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.” –Chuck Close
  1. “Art is as natural as sunshine and as vital as nourishment.” –MaryAnn F. Kohl

  1. “If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” –Michelangelo
  1. “I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.” –Bob Ross
  1. “The big artist…keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.” –Thomas Eakins
  1. “The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it” –David Hockney
  1. “Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.” –Gustav Klimt
  1. “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” –Robert Hughes
  1. “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” –Aristotle
  1. “Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands.” –Millard Sheets
  1. “Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.” –Auguste Rodin

  1. “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.” –Joan Miro
  1. “Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.” –Anselm Kiefer
  1. “The position of the artist if humble. He is essentially a channel.” –Piet Mondrian
  1. “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” –Anais Nin
  1. “Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” –Stella Adler
  1. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” –Pablo Picasso
  1. “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” –George Bernard Shaw
  1. “The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good.” –Kapil Gupta
  1. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see” –Edgar Degas

  1. “In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.” –Henri de Toulouse Lautrec
  1. “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!” –Dr. Seuss
  1. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” –Scott Adams
  1. “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” – Marc Chagall
  1. “We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.” –Julia Cameron
  1. “When I paint, I never think of selling. People fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.” –Edvard Munch
  1. “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’Keeffe
  1. “Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.” –John Ruskin
  1. “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” –Francisco Goya

  1. “Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation.” –Graham Greene
  1. “When I feel a little confused the only thing to do is to turn back to the study of nature before launching once again into the subjects closest to heart.” –Raoul Dufy
  1. “Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.” –Leonardo da Vinci
  1. “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” –Henri Matisse
  1. “Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” –Leo Burnett
  1. “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” –William Faulkner
  1. “Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” – Charles Mingus
  1. “Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else.” –Sydney Gurewitz Clemens
  1. “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” –J.K. Rowling
  1. “Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.” –Magdalena Abakanowicz
  1. “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” –Georgia O’Keeffe
  1. “Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.” –Neil Gaiman
  1. “When I say artist I mean the man who is building things…some with a brush – some with a shovel – some choose a pen.” –Jackson Pollock

Illustration: Inspiring Quotes About Art For Kids | Child Art Quotes

Art Quotes for Kids_illustration

Image: Stable Diffusion/MomJunction Design Team

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are five interesting facts about art?

  • Leonardo da Vinci took 12 years to paint the Mona Lisa’s lips.
  • Art was an Olympic event in the past.
  • Art teaches individuals that there are multiple solutions to problems.
  • In 1565, the first pencil was invented in England.
  • Picasso loved animals. He had many pets, such as a mouse, a monkey, a turtle, besides cats and dogs.

2. How do I introduce art to children?

You can encourage children to express what they feel about a painting. Try validating their opinions and ideas and let them explore various art materials. You can explore different painting ideas for kids and show them how to draw and paint. Let them observe and learn.

3. What is art explained to a child?

Art is a creative approach to telling our tales through stories, whether actual or made up. It is imaginatively and skillfully made, is beautiful, and effectively conveys a sea of thoughts, emotions or visual representation such as sculptures, mural paintings or sketches.

4. Why is art important for kids?

Art provides developmental benefits for children by enhancing motor skills, language development, decision-making, and visual learning. Activities like drawing and sculpting improve fine motor control, while discussing art fosters vocabulary. It also strengthens problem-solving skills and promotes creativity, encouraging innovation. Art helps children interpret visual information and become smart consumers. Additionally, art fosters cultural awareness and has been linked to improved academic performance, assisting kids to excel in various areas of life (1).

Art is one of the best ways to engage the senses in open-ended play and promote cognitive development. It also enhances social and emotional skills in children. However, becoming a professional artist takes years of practice and dedication before they can enact a worthy performance. Hence, most famous artists have a lot to share about art and their journey with today’s generation. These quotes can be inspiring and increase children’s interest in art. Hence, share these inspiring art quotes for kids to instill motivation and help them achieve their artistic goals.

Infographic: Famous Quotes About Art

Art is a way of living, and every person is an artist in a unique way. If you have noticed your child’s creativity and want to encourage them, use kind words to motivate them to learn and practice more. Check out the infographic below for some inspiring quotes about art, and read out to them.

inspiring art quotes from famous personalities (infographic)

Illustration: Momjunction Design Team

Key Pointers

  • Art is a great way to unleash your child’s imagination.
  • Quotes about art encourage your child to be more creative.
  • You can inspire your child to become like their favorite artist.
  • Display their art pieces with a quote to show your pride.
  • Art is a hobby that can be taken up regardless of age.
  • You can introduce art to your child using quotes and show how art is a way of showing emotions.

Check out this amazing video featuring the top 25 best quotes about art! Get inspired and learn from the greats with these insightful words.

References

MomJunction's articles are written after analyzing the research works of expert authors and institutions. Our references consist of resources established by authorities in their respective fields. You can learn more about the authenticity of the information we present in our editorial policy.
  1. The Importance Of Art In Child Development.
    https://www.pbs.org/parents/thrive/the-importance-of-art-in-child-development

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Vinita Agrawal is an accomplished poet hailing from Indore, India. She has garnered significant recognition for her poetic endeavors, including winning the prestigious Proverse prize in Hong Kong in 2021 for her collection of poems titled "Twilight Language.

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Sravani Rebbapragada
Sravani RebbapragadaMSc (Biotechnology)
Sravani holds a post-graduate degree in Biotechnology from SRM University, Chennai. Being an avid reader, she keeps herself up to date with research. Her interest lies in teaching new things to children in creative ways. For MomJunction, she covers literature and information/ facts articles for kids.

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Harshita Makvana
Harshita MakvanaB.Com, PG Dip
Harshita is a graduate in commerce and holds a PG Diploma in Patent and Copyrights Law from NALSAR University. She has also pursued CA and has more than three years of internship experience in auditing. Her love for travelling has taken her to various parts of the world, and writing the travelogues was what brought out her love for content writing.

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