Art Quotes Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.     Scott Adams To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. Joseph Chilton Pearce What we play is life.     Louis Armstrong Let each man exercise the art he knows.     Aristophanes Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.     William Baziotes Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.     Henry Ward Beecher Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.     Ambrose Bierce Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.     Elizabeth Bowen [Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.     Al Capp I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.     Miguel de Cervantes Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.     G. K. Chesterton Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.     Cicero Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.     Eugene Delacroix Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.     Isak Dineson I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.     Duke Ellington Every artist was first an amateur.     Ralph Waldo Emerson 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 If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.     Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider Art is either plagiarism or revolution.     Paul Gauguin I shut my eyes in order to see.     Paul Gauguin Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.     Andre Gide A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.     Edmond de Goncourt Repetition is the death of art.     Robin Green Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.     Penn Jillette We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.     John F. Kennedy 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 What I dream of is an art of balance.     Henri Matisse I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.     Brooke McEldowney It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.     Jeff Melvoin You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.     Jeff Melvoin Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.     W. Somerset Maugham Life isn't long enough for love and art.     W. Somerset Maugham Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.     Piero Milani The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.     Piet Mondrian Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.     Stephen Nachmanovitch Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.     Pablo Picasso Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.     Pablo Picasso 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 There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.     Pablo Picasso The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.     Jackson Pollock All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.     M. C. Richards I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.     Charles Rosin Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.     John Singer Sargent All art is an imitation of nature.     Seneca I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.     Ben Shahn Creativity is...seeing something that doesn't exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.     Michele Shea Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.     Simonides Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.     George Tooker So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.     Brenda Ueland I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.     Orson Welles Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.     Edith Wharton Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?     Edith Wharton Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.     Alfred North Whitehead Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.     Frank Zappa Previous Subject - Argument | Next Subject - Atheism