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

Aristotle

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Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

Jean Arp

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Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.

Francis Bacon

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The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Francis Bacon

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You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

Francis Bacon

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...I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.

Georg Baselitz

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What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.

Georg Baselitz

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It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Charles Baudelaire

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Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.

Max Beckmann

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My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.

Max Beckmann

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I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare...my business is to create.

William Blake

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They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

Constantin Brancusi

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What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things...it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.

Constantin Brancusi

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Don't look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.

Constantin Brancusi

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To see far is one thing, going there is another.

Constantin Brancusi

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Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.

Constantin Brancusi

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Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

Georges Braque

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Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

Georges Braque

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Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.

Georges Braque

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From the beginning of my abstract work, even when it might not have seemed so, I felt there was no better model for me to choose than the Universe.

Alexander Calder

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I paint with shapes.

Alexander Calder

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The sense of motion in painting and sculpture has long been considered as one of the primary elements of the composition.

Alexander Calder

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Don't be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation.

Paul Cezanne

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A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Paul Cezanne

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What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is in harmony parallel with nature.

Paul Cezanne

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All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one's private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.

Paul Cezanne

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Great art picks up where nature ends.

Marc Chagall

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Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

Marc Chagall

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There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

Charles Chaplin

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Art like morality consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterson

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I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

Chuck Close

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The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.

Gustave Courbet

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Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Salvador Dali

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Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it.

Salvador Dali

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Do not fear mistakes - there are none.

Miles Davis

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Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Edgar Degas

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Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it at 50.

Edgar Degas

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Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

Edgar Degas

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Painting is easy for those that do not know how, but very difficult for those that do!

Edgar Degas

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Miles Davis bends the notes. He doesn't play them, he bends them. I bend the paint.

Willem de Kooning

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The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.

Willem de Kooning

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

Eugene Delacroix

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We work not only to produce but to give value to time.

Eugene Delacroix

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What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Eugene Delacroix

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Abstract literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract... a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Richard Diebenkorn

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For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

Jean Dubuffet

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What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.

Jean Dubuffet

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I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Marcel Duchamp

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I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Marcel Duchamp

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When I feel a little confused the only thing to do is to turn back to the study of nature before launching once again into the subjects closest to heart.

Raoul Dufy

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What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so-called figurative artists insist that what they really care about are the abstract qualities of life.

Marlene Dumas

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

Albert Einstein

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The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have time to read reviews.

T.S. Elliot

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Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though this is how it sometimes appears.

M.C. Escher

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The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Lucian Freud

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I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.

Lucian Freud

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A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.

Paul Gardner

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Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

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Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

Paul Gauguin

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The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

Alberto Giacometti

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Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes. . . . Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.

Arshile Gorky

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You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.

Juan Gris

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 -New- There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art...that painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually define its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is "impure". It is the adjustment of impurities which forces painting's continuity. We are image makers and image ridden...

Philip Guston

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To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

Philip Guston

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Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.

Philip Guston

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My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

Keith Haring

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I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.

Damien Hirst

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Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

Hans Hofmann

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The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

Hans Hofmann

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What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles. . . . It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

Hans Hofmann

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There is no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work in the right way.

Winslow Homer

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If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

Edward Hopper

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No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Edward Hopper

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When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"

Howard Ikemoto

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I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.

Jasper Johns

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I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

Frida Kahlo

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I applied streaks and blobs of colours onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...

Wassily Kandinsky

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The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.

Wassily Kandinsky

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There is no must in art because art is free.

Wassily Kandinsky

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A line is a dot that went for a walk.

Paul Klee

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Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

Paul Klee

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Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me forever... Color and I are one. I am a painter.

Paul Klee

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One eye sees, the other feels.

Paul Klee

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The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Paul Klee

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I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.

Jeff Koons

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Things don't get tough in the studio. Sometimes things get tough outside the studio and going in the studio is a relief, a sanctuary, therapy.

Mark Kostabi

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Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.

Karl Kraus

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Make sure you love art and don't do it if you don't, because you'll be found out. Don't listen to the teachers. And feel it. Do it because you can't do anything else. Once you've decided, don't do anything else, because as someone once said, "art is long."

David Larwill - Australian painter

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I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and clichéd and the fact that art really can't be this way.

Roy Lichtenstein

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I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.

Roy Lichtenstein

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Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

Rene Magritte

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Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.

Rene Magritte

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An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.

Andre Malraux'

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I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.

Og Mandino

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Creativity takes courage.

Henri Matisse

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

Henri Matisse

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I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

Henri Matisse

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I am too involved in what I am doing, I cannot tear myself away from it. For me nothing else exists.

Henri Matisse

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It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.
Henri Matisse

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There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Henri Matisse

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What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.

Henri Matisse

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

Thomas Merton

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A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.

Michelangelo

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

Michaelangelo

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Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

Michaelangelo

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If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.

Michelangelo

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Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

Michelangelo

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I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

Joan Miro

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When I begin a painting, I am obeying a physical impulse, a necessity to begin.

Joan Miro

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The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

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Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

Claude Monet

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There are universal shapes to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off.

Henry Moore

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To be an artist is to believe in life.

Henry Moore

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It is important to express oneself...provided the feelings are real and are taken from you own experience.

Berthe Morisot

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I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

William Morris

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Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience -- intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.

Robert Motherwell

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The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Robert Motherwell

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One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.

Robert Motherwell

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Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye.. it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

Edvard Munch

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No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

Edvard Munch

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Art is everywhere except it has to pass through a creative mind.

Louise Nevelson

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I just feel that I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working....In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall. That's the only place where everything is all right.

Louise Nevelson

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature. But I am also a sculptor of the West. I place my mark and do not hide.

Isamu Noguchi

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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

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I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

Georgia O'Keeffe

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One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself - I can't live where I want to - I can't go where I want to - I can't do what I want to - I can't even say what I want to...I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.

Georgia O'Keeffe

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So I said to myself-I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

Georgia O'Keeffe

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Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.

Georgia O'Keeffe

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The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

Georgia O'Keeffe

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I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

Claes Oldenberg

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Painting is a means of self-enlightenment.

John Olsen

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If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts.

Francis Picabia

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An artist lies to reach another kind of truth.

Pablo Picasso

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

Pablo Picasso

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Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Pablo Picasso

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I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

Pablo Picasso

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I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Pablo Picasso

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Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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People want to find a "meaning" in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.

Pablo Picasso

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Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

Pablo Picasso

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There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There's no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark.

Pablo Picasso

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There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

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When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.

Pablo Picasso

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Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Camille Pissaro

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On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

Jackson Pollock

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The painting has a life of its own.

Jackson Pollock

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Every good painter paints what he is.

Jackson Pollock

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I am indifferent to things that do not interest me, but never would I attack them especially in the creative arts, because I say anybody who does creative arts is a sacred person. I don't care what he does, whether he paints academic pictures or is modern or anything else. He cannot do any harm, whereas a bad politician or a bad doctor, or a bad cook can kill you.

Man Ray

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My drawings are not intended to define anything: they inspire, they lead, like music, into an ambiguous world where there is no cause and no effect.

Odilon Redon

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What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artists feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

Odilon Redon

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Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.

Rembrandt

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You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

Pierre Auguste Renoir

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Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters -- but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

Larry Rivers

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Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

Ned Rorem

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I tell young people that the greatest paintings in museums are made with minerals mixed in oil smeared on cloth with the hair from the back of a pig's ear. It's that simple.

James Rosenquist

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Sometimes the painting starts to relate very directly to either sights seen or experiences felt, other times it just goes off on a tangent that you really can't articulate.

Susan Rothenberg

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It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

Mark Rothko

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The progression of a painter's work as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity.. toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea.. and the idea and the observer.. To achieve this clarity is inevitably to be understood.

Mark Rothko

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For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

Georges Rouault

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Most artists are doing basically the same thing - staying off the streets.

Edward Ruscha

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The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live.

Albert Pinkham Ryder

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Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.

David Salle

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Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

Egon Schiele

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I do dream about art, and images come to me in dreams. I am definitely hoping to be in touch with my subconscious. I expect a call any minute.

Julian Schnabel

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I'm not precious about my work. If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.

Richard Serra

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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

Ben Shahn

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Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

Frank Stella

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It takes two people to create a painting. The artist, and someone to shoot him, so he'll quit working on the painting.

Robert Terrell   (not certified famous)

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A conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration.

Wayne Thiebaud

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In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

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An artist never really finishes his work. He merely abandons it.

Paul Valery

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It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Vincent Van Gogh

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The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.

Vincent Van Gogh

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I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.

Vincent Van Gogh

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The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.

Vincent Van Gogh

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Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

Leonardo da Vinci

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Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Andy Warhol

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Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

Andy Warhol

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Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

Andy Warhol

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

James McNeill Whistler

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Art is the thrilling spark that beats death - that's all.

Brett Whiteley

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The fine art of painting, which is the bastard of alchemy, always has been always will be, a game. The rules of the game are quite simple: in a given arena, on as many psychic fronts as the talent allows, one must visually describe, the centre of the meaning of existence.

Brett Whiteley

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

Oscar Wilde

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It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

Oscar Wilde

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Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa

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Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say that there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Frank Zappa

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Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible.

Frank Zappa

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Interviewer: "So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?"

Frank Zappa: "You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?"

(This actually occurred. The interviewer had his leg amputated from a war injury)

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