Art

Adams, Ansel	There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
Adams, Scott	Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Amiel, Henri	The great artist is the simplifier.
Anderson, Laurie	As an artist, I’d choose the thing that’s beautiful more than the one that’s true.
Anouilh, Jean	The object of art is to give life a shape.
Aristotle	The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Bacon, Francis	The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.
Bacon, Francis	There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Banksy	Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a sharp knife to it.
Beecher, Henry Ward	Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Bellow, Saul	Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.
Bergson, Henri	The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Bernhard, Ruth	If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.
Borges, Jorge Luis	It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his nocturnes answered: “All of my life.”
Boubat, Edouard	The wandering photographer sees the same show that everyone else sees. He, however, stops to watch it.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri	In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.
Cezanne, Paul	Right now a moment of time is passing by! We must become that moment.
Chagall, Marc	Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.
Chagall, Marc	Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.
Chazal	All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith	Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.
Cole, Thomas	To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.
Collingwood, R. G.	The craftsman knows what he wants to make before he makes it.…The making of a work of art…is a strange and risky business in which the maker never knows quite what he is making until he makes it.
De Niro, Robert	When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense.
Degas, Edgar	Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Degas, Edgar	Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
Degas, Edgar	Painting is easy for those that do not know how, but very difficult for those that do!
Delacroix	One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.
Delacroix, Eugene	One always begins by imitating.
DeStaebler, Stephen	Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.
Downey, Jr. Robert	I say forget Method and just go right to the madness. I’m not really even an actor. I make faces for cash and chicken.
Duchamp, Marcel	Art is a habit-forming drug.
Elliot, T. S.	Great art can communicate before it is understood.
Ellis, Havelock	Every artist writes his own autobiography.
Ellis, Havelock	The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Every artist was first an amateur.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
Feiffer, Jules	Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.
Francis of Assisi	He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands, his head and his heart is an artist.
Frost, Robert	To me the thing that art does for life is to clean it–to strip it to form.
Gauguin, Paul	A painting is never finished—it simply stops in interesting places.
Gauguin, Paul	Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Gauguin, Paul	I shut my eyes in order to see.
Gehry, Frank	If you know where it’s going, it’s not worth doing.
Gide, Andre	Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von	Architecture is frozen music.
Gogh, Vincent van	Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
Gogh, Vincent van	I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.
Goldsworthy, Andy	The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.
Graham, Martha	No artist is ahead of his time. He is the time. It is just that others are behind the time.
Graham, Martha	The body says what words cannot.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	Sunlight is painting.
Hamill, Pete	The model was where you began, nothing more; the drawing was the result. The model was a collection of facts; the drawing was the truth.
Henri, Robert	All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.
Hoffer, Eric	When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Hooks, Bell	The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.
Hopper, Edward	If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.
Hsich, Tehy	Harmony would lose its attractiveness if it did not have a background of discord.
Hunt, Leigh	Colors are the smiles of nature…they are her laughs, as in flowers.
Ikemoto, Howard	When my daughter was about 7, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at a college—that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forgot?”
Inness, George	The true purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression a scene has made on him.
Innis, W. Joe	In art, as in literature, ugliness rendered with compassion is beauty.
Kael, Pauline	Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Kahlo, Frida	They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
Kent, Corita	A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it. That’s why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.
Kepler, Johannes	Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
Klee, Paul	A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.
Klee, Paul	Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.
Kooning, Willem de	I have to change to stay the same.
L’Engle, Madeleine	The work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am, serve me.” The artist must be obedient to the work.
Lamott, Anne	To be great, art has to point somewhere.
Lao-Tzu	The greatest carver does the least cutting.
Latin saying	Nature is the art of God.
Lubbock, John	Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
Machado, Antonio	There is no way of seeing things without first taking leave of them.
Mann, Thomas	Beauty can pierce one like a pain.
Maslow, Abraham	A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
Matisse, Henri	I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Matisse, Henri	It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everyone else.
Matisse, Henri	Precision is not reality.
Matisse, Henri	There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them.
Matisse, Henri	There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
Max-Tixier, Jean	Years of patience, discipline and effort are the price of access to a strict and personal vision. An artist is not born but made.
McNeil, James	An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
Merton, Thomas	Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Michelangelo	I live and love in God’s peculiar light.
Miller, Henry	Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
Miller, Henry	Confusion is a word invented for an order not yet understood.
Miro, Joan	I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
Mondrian, Piet	The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Monet, Claude	And then, all of a sudden I had the revelation of the enchantments of my pond!
Monet, Claude	I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Monet, Claude	Nobody can count themselves an artist unless they can carry a picture in their head before they paint it.
Moses, Grandma	If I didn’t start painting [at age 78], I would have raised chickens.
Motherwell, Robert	Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
Munch, Edvard	What is art? Art grows out of grief and joy, but mainly grief. It is born of people’s lives.
Nathan, George Jean	Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
Neel, Alice	One of the reasons I paint is to catch light as it goes by, right hot off the griddle.
Nevelson, Louise	Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.
Nolde, Emil	The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks.
O’Keeffe, Georgia	I decided to start anew—to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.
O’Keeffe, Georgia	When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.
O’Keeffe, Georgia	Filling a space in a beautiful way. That’s what art means to me.
O’Keeffe, Georgia	I find that I have painted my life—things happening in my life—without knowing.
O’Keeffe, Georgia	I found I could say things with colors and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had no words for.
O’Keeffe, Georgia	Rivers and roads lead people on.
O’Keeffe, Georgia	To create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.
Ozenfant, Amedee	Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary.
Pater, Walter	It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character of art.
Pauling, Linus	The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
Picasso, Pablo	An artist must know how to convince others of the truth of his lies.
Picasso, Pablo	Art is a lie that reveals truth.
Picasso, Pablo	Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Picasso, Pablo	Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
Picasso, Pablo	Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.
Picasso, Pablo	Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the singing of the birds? Why do they love the night, a flower, everything that surrounds them, without trying to understand them? But painting—that they must understand.
Picasso, Pablo	I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.
Picasso, Pablo	I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
Picasso, Pablo	It takes a long time to become young.
Picasso, Pablo	Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Picasso, Pablo	My mother said to me, “If you become a soldier you’ll be a general; if you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
Picasso, Pablo	Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
Picasso, Pablo	Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Picasso, Pablo	The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away.
Picasso, Pablo	The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
Picasso, Pablo	There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Picasso, Pablo	Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog until I pointed out that it was really a typewriter.
Picasso, Pablo	We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Picasso, Pablo	When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael: it took me many years to learn how to draw like these children.
Pina	I’m not so interested in how people move, but in what moves them.
Pissarro, Camille	Paint the essential character of things.
Plato	Ideas are more real than the physical world.
Renoir, Auguste	One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.
Robbins, Tom	Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
Rohe, Miles van der	Less is more.God is in the details.
Ross, Bob	We don’t make mistakes. We just have happy accidents.
Royal, Jessica	By painting I pour out not only what I see, but what I wish to see. [age thirteen]
Ruskin, John	When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
Russell, Bertrand	When we look at a rock what we are seeing is not the rock, but the effect of the rock upon us.
Saint-Exupery, Antoine de	You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
Schaller, Thomas W.	The world is filled with artists. Only some of them use paintbrushes.
Schaller, Thomas W.	Try not to paint whatever it was that inspired you—paint the inspiration itself.
Schelter, Kate	My mother is a potter, and all of our mugs and bowls were handmade by her. I love having her with me at each meal, even though she is two thousand miles away.
Shakespeare, William	The earth has music for those who listen.
Simonides	Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
Steele, Richard	Simplicity, of all things, is the hardest to be copied.
Stone, Irving	Art is a staple, like bread or wine or a warm coat in winter. Man’s spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.
Swedish proverb	A good spectator also creates.
Thoreau, Henry David	Everything beautiful impresses us as sufficient to itself.
Thoreau, Henry David	The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
Tolstoy, Leo	Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Tolstoy, Leo	Art is the activity whereby a person makes a conscious attempt to use the particular means at his disposal to transmit his feelings to others so that they feel them as intensely as he does.
Unknown	Art is older than humanity.
Unknown	Beauty that is unaware of itself is the most beautiful.
Unknown	Harvard has a library of rare colours.
Unknown	Sometimes you have to leave your home to find your home.
Unknown	The artist doesn’t see things as they are, but as he is.
Unknown	The story is told of an accomplished artist who was applying the finishing touches to a bronze sculpture. He kept filing, scraping, and polishing every little surface of his masterpiece. “When will it be done?” asked an observer. “Never,” came the reply. “I just keep working and working until they come and take it away.”
Unknown	We are a part of all we have met.
Unknown	You know it’s a good design when people either love it or hate it.
Valery, Paul	The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.
Van Gogh, Vincent	Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
Van Gogh, Vincent	I dream my painting and then I paint my dream.
Van Gogh, Vincent	If your inner voice is telling you that you can’t paint, by all means, hurry up and paint and silence the voice.
Vinci, Leonardo da	One of the functions of art is undoubtedly to allow to us escape from the narrowness of our own vision and discover something of the breadth and depth, beauty and wholeness of life.
Vinci, Leonardo da	Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.
Wade, Robert	I don’t paint how it looks. I paint how it feels.
Whitehead, A. N.	It takes a very unusual mind to undertake an analysis of the obvious.
Wren, Christopher	Varieties of uniformities make complete beauty.
Wright, Frank Lloyd	Every great architect is—necessarily—a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
Wright, Frank Lloyd	Pictures deface walls oftener that they decorate them.
Wright, Frank Lloyd	Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
Yaghjian, David	The reason I paint is because it makes me sane.
Yiddish proverb	The eyes are the mirror of the soul.

Christian Quotations

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