Art Quotes

The ancient Romans had a saying that art is long and life is short...

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)

How do I know when a work is finished? When it has taken away from me everything I have to give. When it has become stronger than myself. I become the empty one and it becomes the full one. When I am weak and it is strong the work is finished.
Saul Baizerman, sculptor

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887)
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

Diogenes to Alexander the Great : 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.
John W. Garner (1912 - )

A work of art should start with the senses and proceed to the intellect.
Jules Dupre'

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.
Henry David Thoreau, writer and philosopher

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts -- only in the truth.
Ursula K. LeGuin, writer

When I paint my goal is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for.
Pablo Picasso, artist

. . . to quote Mallarme: "A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business."
Paul Gauguin, artist

A really artistic production cannot be made to order, for a true work of art is the revelation . . . of a new conception of life arising in the artist's soul, which, when expressed, lights up the path along which humanity progresses.
Leo Tolstoy, writer, What is Art?