Smylie, Catie

Words to inspire your creativity and artistry...

Creativity takes courage.

- Henri Matisse

The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt.

- Sylvia Plath

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

- Vincent van Gogh

Art reveals who we are and who we long to be.

- Erwin McManus

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

- Thomas Merton

Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.

- Saul Bellow

Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome.  No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

- André Gide

A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.

- Robert Henri

We are both works of art and artists at work.

- Erwin Raphael McManus

The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

- Robert Henri

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Elbert Hubbard

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The world is beautiful but not sayable.  That's why we need art.

- Charles Simic

Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.

- Anni Albers

True creativity does not come easy; creativity is born of risk and refined from failure.

- Erwin McManus

The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

- Julia Cameron

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

- William Plomer

An artist is an explorer.

- Henri Matisse

When we stop fearing failure, we start being artists.

- Ann Voskamp

A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.

- Grace Hartigan

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

- Vincent van Gogh

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, am here to live out loud.

- Emile Zola

Action is the foundational key to all success.

- Pablo Picasso

The meaning of life is to find your gift.  The purpose of life is to give it away.

- Pablo Picasso

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

- Louise Bourgeois

The artist is not a special kind of person; rather each person is a special kind of artist.

- Ananda Coomaraswamy

Art is when a human tells another human what it is to be human.

- Adrian Elmer

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

- Claude Monet

Always keep your eyes open.  Keep watching.  Because whatever you can see can inspire you.

- Grace Coddington

Art offers sanctuary to everyone willing to open their hearts as well as their eyes.

- Nikki Giovanni

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

- Oscar Wilde

There is no innovation and creativity without failure.

- Brene Brown

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

- Herman Melville

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

- Robert Hughes