Action is the foundational key to all success.
Pablo Picasso

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.
Pablo Picasso

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?
Pablo Picasso

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Pablo Picasso

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
Pablo Picasso

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
Pablo Picasso

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
Pablo Picasso

Let each man exercise the art he knows.
Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC), Wasps, 422 B.C.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969)

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland

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, Pibgorn commentary, 03-31-05

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, Northern Exposure, Aurora Borealis, 1990

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

What I dream of is an art of balance.
Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), O Magazine, April 2003

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

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.
Isak Dineson, 'Babette's Feast'

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956)

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.
Jadelr and Cristina Cordova, Chasing Windmills, 07-11-2006

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.
David Cronenberg, Rocketboom, 07-19-06

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.
David Cronenberg, Rocketboom, 07-19-06

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, Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington (1899 - 1974)

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 (1879 - 1970)

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp (1909 - 1979)

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947), Dialogues (1954)

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

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 (1874 - 1925)

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

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 (1862 - 1937)

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
Edmond de Goncourt (1822 - 1896)

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugene Delacroix (1798 - 1863)

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

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954)

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.
George Tooker