1. To make pictures big is to make them more powerful. - Robert Mapplethorpe
2. Paint the essential character of things. - Camille Pissarro
3. Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. - Igor Stravinsky
4. The perfection of art is to conceal art. - Quintilian
5. The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art. - Paul Klee
6. One eye sees, the other feels. - Paul Klee
7. A line is a dot that went for a walk. - Paul Klee
8. I paint with shapes. - Alexander Calder
9. To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect. - Alexander Calder
10. It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found. - Wilson Mizner
11. Art is science made clear. - Wilson Mizner
12. Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art. - Constantin Stanislavski
13. Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. - Iris Murdoch
14. All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous. - Iris Murdoch
15. Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time. - Jean Cocteau
16. Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious. - Jean Cocteau
17. An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. - Jean Cocteau
18. An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original. - Jean Cocteau
19. Every artist writes his own autobiography. - Havelock Ellis
20. The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear. - John James Audubon
21. Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. - Dorothea Lange
22. Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. - Rene Magritte
23. The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. - Henri Cartier-Bresson
24. Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience. - Chuck Close
25. An artist carries on throughout his life a mysterious, uninterrupted conversation with his public. - Maurice Chevalier
26. Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art. - Jerry Saltz
27. Painting and writing are solitary arts. - Conrad Hall
28. Art depends on luck and talent. - Francis Ford Coppola
29. I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing. - Francis Ford Coppola
30. I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies. - Le Corbusier
31. Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. - Thomas Wolfe
32. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. - Robert Smithson
33. I cry out for order and find it only in art. - Helen Hayes
34. Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies. - Anish Kapoor
35. What is art but a way of seeing? - Saul Bellow
36. I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota. - Gustave Courbet
37. To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist. - Robert Schumann
38. Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums. - Peter De Vries
39. One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil. - Balthus
40. Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. - Balthus
41. One's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes. - Andrew Wyeth
42. Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude. - Beck
43. My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art. - Clara Schumann
44. In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death. - Damien Hirst
45. It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. - Max Eastman
46. Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views. - Mary Schmich
47. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
48. The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
49. If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. - Arne Jacobsen
50. I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it. - Laurie Anderson
51. Art is pattern informed by sensibility. - Herbert Read
52. What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. - John Berger
53. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. - Stella Adler
54. The best artists know what to leave out. - Charles de Lint
55. Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate. - Andre Malraux
56. It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception. - Robert Motherwell
57. Wherever art appears, life disappears. - Robert Motherwell
58. Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling? - M. C. Escher
59. I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. - Auguste Rodin
60. I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them. - Diane Arbus
61. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion. - Kary Mullis
62. To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts - absolute gifts - which have not been acquired by one's own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist much possess the courageous soul. - Kate Chopin
63. To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity. - Lewis Mumford
64. An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. - Charles Horton Cooley
65. I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind. - Henry Ossawa Tanner
66. I will preach with my brush. - Henry Ossawa Tanner
67. Painting is by nature a luminous language. - Robert Delaunay
68. Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting. - Robert Delaunay
69. Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint. - Robert Delaunay
70. An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. - James Whistler
71. I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body. - Barbara Hepworth
72. Trying to force creativity is never good. - Sarah McLachlan
73. The goal of art was the vital expression of self. - Alfred Stieglitz
74. Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist. - Franz Liszt
75. Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. - John Ciardi
76. Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting. - Elizabeth Bowen
77. Art is Art. Everything else is everything else. - Ad Reinhardt 78. Art is too serious to be taken seriously. - Ad Reinhardt
79. It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter. - Alfred Eisenstaedt
80. When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear. - Alfred Eisenstaedt
81. We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant. - Alfred Eisenstaedt
82. In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it. - Ernst Fischer
83. I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art. - Ernst Fischer
84. Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued. - Jean Rostand
85. I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages. - John Zorn
86. The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes. - David Rockefeller
87. The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness. - Joan Miro
88. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. - Jerzy Kosinski
89. The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. - Jerzy Kosinski
90. I am not strong on perfection. - Jasper Johns
91. I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman. - Peter Max
92. The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her. - William Morris Hunt
93. I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many. - Robert Indiana
94. I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza. - Robert Indiana
95. I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists. - Robert Indiana
96. If you know somethin' well, you can always paint it but people would be better off buyin' chickens. - Grandma Moses
97. Art must take reality by surprise. - Francoise Sagan
98. To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing. - Philip Guston
99. Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again. - Philip Guston
100. Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort. - Robert Quillen
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