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Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.
Franz Liszt
My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.
Tadao Ando
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Dorothea Lange
Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
William Wordsworth
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
Arthur Erickson
Rules and models destroy genius and art.
William Hazlitt
So vast is art, so narrow human wit.
Alexander Pope
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso
That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.
James Taylor
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle
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
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
Walt Whitman
The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.
Novalis
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.
Pablo Picasso
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Cyril Connolly
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
Eugene Delacroix
The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.
Paul Strand
The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.
Paul Cezanne
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Plato
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
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
Dale Carnegie
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Abraham Lincoln
The history of art is the history of revivals.
Samuel Butler
The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Paul Gauguin
The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
David Hockney
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Ellen Key
The most profound things are inexpressible.
Jenny Holzer
The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
Ansel Adams
The perfection of art is to conceal art.
Marcus Fabius Quintilian
The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.
Jerzy Kosinski
The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.
Jerzy Kosinski
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso
The real art of conducting consists in transitions.
Gustav Mahler
The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.
Elbert Hubbard
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Theodor Adorno
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
Michelangelo
The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
Carl Rogers
The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
Henry Miller
The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.
Elia Kazan
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
Ansel Adams
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
Ansel Adams
Things are beautiful if you love them.
Jean Anouilh
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
Henry David Thoreau
Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
Henri Matisse
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Henry David Thoreau
To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.
Alexander Calder
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
E. M. Forster
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.
Robert Schumann
Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo
True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein
Trying to force creativity is never good.
Sarah McLachlan
Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.
Fran Lebowitz
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift
Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.
Arthur Erickson
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
Pablo Picasso
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
W. H. Auden
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.
Paul Cezanne
When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process.
Jim Hodges
When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.
Robert Mapplethorpe
When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.
Edward Steichen
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Albert Camus
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
Winston Churchill
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
E. M. Forster
You don't take a photograph, you make it.
Ansel Adams
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake
My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.
Clara Schumann
My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.
Paul Getty
My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
Pablo Picasso
My painting does not come from the easel.
Jackson Pollock
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde
No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.
Theodore Bikel
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
Ansel Adams
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert
Our natures are a lot like oil, mix us with anything else, and we strive to swim on top.
Joan Rivers
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.
Salvador Dali
Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
Edgar Degas
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Ambrose Bierce
Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.
Edward Steichen
