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.