Ambrose Bierce

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

Paul Gauguin

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Francis Bacon

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Federico Fellini

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

David Herbert Lawrence

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

Robert Schumann

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.

Jackson Pollock

Every good painter paints what he is.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

All art is but imitation of nature.

David Hockney

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Walt Whitman

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

John Berger

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

John Updike

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Winston Churchill

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Jackson Pollock

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

Salvador Dali

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Emile Zola

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Ansel Adams

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

John Ruskin

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Ansel Adams

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Pablo Picasso

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

George Edward Moore

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

George Santayana

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

Paul Cezanne

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.

Plato

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Gustave Flaubert

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Honore de Balzac

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Al Capp

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Oscar Wilde

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the proper task of life.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Leo Tolstoy

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Jean Cocteau

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.

W. Somerset Maugham

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

John Ruskin

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Elbert Hubbard

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

Andy Warhol

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Ambrose Bierce

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

Fran Lebowitz

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.

Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

Henry Ward Beecher

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Andy Warhol

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Abraham Lincoln

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Anatole France

In art as in love, instinct is enough.




Paul Valery

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Pablo Picasso

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.

George Bernard Shaw

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Oscar Wilde

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

Edgar Degas

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

Michelangelo

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

Gertrude Stein

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Dorothea Lange

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

Andre Gide

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Khalil Gibran

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

Carl Rogers

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Albert Einstein

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Anais Nin

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Georgia O'Keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

Henry David Thoreau

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Ansel Adams

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist was first an amateur.

Twyla Tharp

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

James Whistler

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Thomas Merton

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Charles Horton Cooley

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Albert Camus

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Oscar Wilde

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Napoleon Bonaparte

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Aristotle

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Pablo Picasso

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

Michelangelo

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Hedy Lamarr

A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.

Horace

A picture is a poem without words.

Salvador Dali

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Henry Miller

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Scott Adams

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Vincent Van Gogh

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

Joel Osteen

Do all you can to make your dreams come true.

Anatole France

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

Henry David Thoreau

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

Edgar Allan Poe

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

Colin Powell

A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.