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

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

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

A picture is a poem without words.
Horace

A picture is worth a thousand words.
Napoleon Bonaparte

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.
Henri Matisse

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
Henry Moore

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

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

Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Albert Camus

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Marshall McLuhan

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

All art is but imitation of nature.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
John Ruskin

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
Frank Gehry

Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
Andre Gide

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

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.
Roy Lichtenstein

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

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.
Robert Delaunay

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

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

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.
Octavio Paz

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Theodor Adorno

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
Henry A. Kissinger

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

Art is not a thing; it is a way.
Elbert Hubbard

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.
Harry S. Truman

Art is science made clear.
Wilson Mizner

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
Amy Lowell

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

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

Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.
Friedrich Schiller

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser

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

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo Picasso

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
Stephen Sondheim

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.
Anish Kapoor

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

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.
Jean Rostand

By the work one knows the workman.
Jean de La Fontaine

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

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Tom Wolfe

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
Henri Matisse

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

Even a true artist does not always produce art.
Carroll O'Connor

Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist writes his own autobiography.
Henry Ellis

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Pablo Picasso

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every good painter paints what he is.
Jackson Pollock

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.
Edward Steichen

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

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.
Louis Kahn

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

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

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.
Pablo Picasso

Great art picks up where nature ends.
Marc Chagall

I always try to balance the light with the heavy - a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes.
Bette Midler

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.
Auguste Rodin

I cry out for order and find it only in art.
Helen Hayes

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Henri Matisse

I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.
Francis Ford Coppola

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

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

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
Roy Lichtenstein

I paint with shapes.
Alexander Calder

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.
Jodie Foster

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

I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.
Barbra Streisand

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

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.
Anais Nin

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

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
Lionel Trilling

In art as in love, instinct is enough.
Anatole France

In art the best is good enough.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.
Henry Moore

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
Henri Matisse

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
Oscar Wilde

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
Igor Stravinsky

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
Oscar Wilde

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

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 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 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

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