Artist Quotes

A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.

Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.

A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world.

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

Behind a remarkable scholar we not infrequently find an average human being, and behind an average artist we often find a very remarkable human being.

The theoretical man finds his highest satisfaction in the process of knowing and in the uncovering of the covering; whereas the artist finds delight in what still remains veiled even after the greatest unveiling.

An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.

No artist tolerates reality.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.

The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist or actress is simply masked dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.

Morale - the will to win, the fighting heart - are the honored hallmarks of the football coach and player. Likewise, they are characteristic of the enterprising executive, the successful troop leader, the established artist and the dedicated teacher and scientist.

An artist's studio should be a small space because small rooms discipline the mind and large ones distract it.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies everything placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement.

Surely when a man is painting a picture he ought not refuse to hear any man's opinion... Since men are able to form a true judgement as to the works of nature, how much more does it behoove us to admit that they are able to judge our faults.

Perspective is to painting what the bridle is to the horse, the rudder to a ship.