Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
Man's skull represents the same infinity for the movement of conceptions. It is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that sees in it.
Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.
There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
You see these thick curtains shut out the daylight: artificial light suits me a great deal better; it's absolutely steady, and much more exciting.
Reduction! One wants to say more than nature and one makes the impossible mistake of wanting to say it with more means than she, instead of fewer.
Time is a vindictive bandit to steal the beauty of our former selves. We are left with sagging, rippled flesh and burning gums with empty sockets.
Tolstoy's definition of art is the inverse of the truth; the task of art is to transform not perception into feeling, but feeling into perception.
It's possible to paint a monumental picture that's only 10 inches wide, if one has a sense of scale, which is very different from a sense of size.
Laying complements next to each other makes them scintillating, but mixing them produces a 'muddy' rendering of each color. The mud is good stuff.
I would like to leave this world and never return. I severed my ear, but how I wish that I had severed my heart. I shall never amount to anything.
The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.
Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth... What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!
I was doing research on the Mormon handcart tragedy when I came across information about Brigham Young sending out missions to the Indians in 1855.
I was born knowing that I had to be a painter, because my father, an art historian, always presented painting as the only acceptable thing in life.
They did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress.
I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.
The way good inventions are made is to familiarize yourself with those of others. The men who cultivate letters and the arts are all sons of Homer.
Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.
It is impossible that anything will be well understood or well done that is taken into a reluctant understanding, and executed with a servile hand.
I think what we should concentrate on is what it feels like to be a working artist in the day to day. One doesn't imagine what comes down the line.
The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].
Look at light and admire its beauty. Close your eyes, and then look again: what you saw is no longer there; and what you will see later is not yet.
The variety of colour in objects cannot be discerned at a great distance, excepting in those parts which are directly lighted up by the solar rays.
Where I used to strive for movement and restlessness I now attempt to sense and express the complete total calm of objects and the surrounding air.
You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.
I don’t care about the word ‘art’ because it has been so discredited. So I want to get rid of it. There is an unnecessary adoration of ‘art’ today.
My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.
The colored planes, as much by position and dimension as by the greater value given to color, plastically express only relationships and not forms.
Let us note that art - even on an abstract level - has never been confined to 'idea'; art has always been the 'realized' expression of equilibrium.
Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.
Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.
The Jesuits…are a secret society – a sort of Masonic order – with superadded features of revolting odiousness, and a thousand times more dangerous.
When I came to the West, I saw many, many things for the first time. But I also saw the prosperity of the West critically. It wasn't really Heaven.
Balance, peace, and joy are the fruit of a successful life. It starts with recognizing your talents and finding ways to serve others by using them.
If we see an object as a bowl, it may inhibit seeing it as craft, just as seeing it as craft might inhibit seeing it as art. See first; name later.
Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available.
The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.
Think of me getting up before 6, I'm at work by 7 and I continue until 6.30 in the evening, standing up all the time, nine canvases. It's murderous.
I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.
There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.
I began drinking alcohol at the age of thirteen and gave it up in my fifty sixth year; it was like going straight from puberty to a mid-life crisis.
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.
If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way.
Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.
O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest? Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.
One of the fine moments in 1940s film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign.
What my art probably lacks is a kind of passionate humanity... There is no sensuous relationship, not even the noblest, between myself and the many.
I don't think money can help you become a better painter, for sure. You can have all the studios you want; it won't help you make a better painting.