Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
(Ars longa, vita brevis.) Art is long, life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.
A work of art cannot be satisfied with being a representation; it should be a presentation.
An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.
Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.
As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it absolutely.
Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in.
Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.
I wonder whether Art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black.
If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
