1. The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

- Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

2. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.

3. The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

4. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

5. People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it – walk.

6. I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.

- Pierre Auguste Renoir

7. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

- Pablo Picasso

8. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

- Scott Adams

9. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

- Anthem

10. Rembrandt painted 700 pictures. Of these 3,000 are in existence.

- Wilhelm Bode

11. A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

- Leonardo da Vinci

12. All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?

- Banksy

13. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me – not even you…Only my love – not your answer. Not even your indifference.

14. I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

15. If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.

- Michelangelo

16. I guess I’m a little weird. I like to talk to trees and animals. That’s okay though; I have more fun than most people.

- Bob Ross

17. Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

- Marc Chagall

18. The modern artist is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

- Jackson Pollock

19. The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

20. Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want–you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don’t know. I’ve forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn’t matter, so long as you move.

- We The Living

21. In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.

- Ernest Hemingway

22. I must have flowers, always, and always.

- Claude Monet

23. I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

24. Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement.

25. What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.

- Claude Monet

26. There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can’t stand Picasso, those who can’t stand Raphael, and those who have never heard of either.

- John White

27. The more you look at modern art exhibits, the more everything begins to look like an exhibit, including the attendant’s chair and the fire extinguisher.

- Brian Sewell

28. But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

29. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.

- Wassily Kandinsky

30. One eye sees, the other feels.

- Paul Klee

31. What is man? He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

32. Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

33. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

34. Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

- Leonardo da Vinci

35. Creativity takes courage.

- Henri Matisse

36. Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.

- Gustav Klimt

37. If one doesn’t respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.

38. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

- The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

39. When I die I hope to go to heaven–whatever that is–and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.

40. Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

- Magdalena Abakanowicz

41. Love is the expression of one’s values.

42. There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.

43. If one’s actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.

44. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

45. Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

46. Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

- Pablo Picasso

47. Without tradition art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation it is a corpse.

- Winston Churchill

48. I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

- Atlas Shrugged

49. An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

- Andy Warhol

50. Every artist was first an amateur.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

51. Art is my life and my life is art.

- Yoko Ono

52. The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

- Paul Cézanne

53. No great work of art is ever finished.

- Michelangelo

54. Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

55. The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

- George Bernard Shaw

56. What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.

- Tom Stoppard

57. If the old masters had labelled their fruit, one wouldn’t be so likely to mistake pears for turnips.

- Mark Twain

58. The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.

- Eric Gill

59. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.

60. Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

61. Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

- Philosophy: Who Needs It?

62. Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

63. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.

- Rembrandt

64. Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.

65. Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.

- Michelangelo

66. If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.

- Henri Matisse

67. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

- John F. Kennedy

68. Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he’ll rise.

69. A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others.

- Salvador Dalí

70. Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

- Keith Haring

71. Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.

- Albert Einstein

72. The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

- Pablo Picasso

73. An inventor is a man who asks Why? of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

74. A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.

- Rembrandt

75. In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece.

- Kai Green

76. I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

- Atlas Shrugged

77. An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success.

- Henri Matisse

78. A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

79. The most depraved type of human being is the man without a purpose.

80. An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.

- Andre Malraux

81. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

- George Santayana

82. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

- Banksy

83. Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

- Leonardo da Vinci

84. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.

85. The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

86. The more we can get in tune with the harmony of the planet, the more our art can benefit from that relationship.

- Rick Rubin

87. Do not let your fire go out. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in the lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

88. Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

- Samuel Butler

89. He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

- St. Francis of Assisi

90. You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

- Rick Riordan

91. 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.

- Ben Shahn

92. No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.

93. The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

- Paul Strand

94. Art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

- Rainbow Rowell

95. Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.

96. We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.

- Bob Ross

97. All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

- James Baldwin

98. Everything you can imagine is real.

- Pablo Picasso

99. The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will spark off a revolution.

- Paul Cézanne

100. If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

- Edward Hopper

101. To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

- Pablo Picasso

102. Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

- Edgard Varese

103. If you have a burning restless urge to paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

- Fran Lebowitz

104. If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.

- Emile Zola

105. Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

- Agnes Martin

106. To be an artist is to believe in life.

- Henry Moore

107. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person’s sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life.

108. There is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.

109. Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.

- Albert Einstein

110. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

- Robert Hughes

111. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

- Peter O’Toole

112. The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

- Emile Zola

113. I paint flowers so they will not die.

- Frida Kahlo

114. Don’t think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don’t think. Feel. Believe.

115. Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

116. Art is art, isn’t it? And water is water and east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple-sauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.

- Groucho Marx

117. I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.

- The Fountainhead

118. What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap.

- Marcel Duchamp

119. It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.

- Paul Cézanne

120. It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.

121. The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

122. Art must destroy violence, only it can do it.

- Leo Tolstoy

123. One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor.

124. I shut my eyes in order to see.

- Paul Gauguin

125. Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.

- Al Hirschfield

126. Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

- Pablo Picasso

127. The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.

128. Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

- Banksy

129. Never ask people about your work.

130. When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

- Pablo Picasso

131. Art deteriorates when it is done for the audience.

- James Pierce

132. Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

133. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

134. A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.

- Rembrandt

135. I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

136. I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.

- Frida Kahlo

137. Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!

138. Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?

- Salvador Dalí

139. The measure of hell you’re able to endure is the measure of your love.

140. The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

- Robert Henri

141. We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

142. Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

- Henry Ward Beecher

143. Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

- John Ciardi

144. An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

- Charles Cooley

145. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

146. You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.

147. A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

- Paul Cézanne

148. The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

- Francis Bacon

149. Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.

- Claude Monet

150. Art is never finished, only abandoned.

- Leonardo da Vinci

151. Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

- Oscar Wilde

152. I couldn’t give you something mediocre even if that’s all you asked for.

- Michelangelo

153. To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul – would you understand why that’s much harder?

154. An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.

- J.D. Salinger

155. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

156. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

157. A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others.

- Salvador Dalí

158. Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.

159. Any alleged right of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another isn’t and can’t be a right.

160. Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.

161. Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.

- Georges Braque

162. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

163. Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.

- Leon Trotsky

164. Man needs music, literature, and painting – all those oases of perfection that make up art – to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

- Fernando Botero

165. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

- Oscar Wilde

166. Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

- André Gide

167. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

168. The businessman’s tool is value.

169. The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

- Paul Gauguin

170. An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

- Charles Bukowski

171. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

172. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.

- Atlas Shrugged

173. There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

- Charles Dickens

174. Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

175. I hate flowers. I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

176. Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

- Edgar Degas

177. Van Gogh would have sold more than one painting if he’d put tigers in them.

- Tom Hobbes

178. Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.

179. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

- Thomas Merton

180. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

181. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

- John F. Kennedy

182. An individualist is a man who says: I will not run anyone’s life – nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone – nor sacrifice anyone to myself.

183. There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.

184. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

185. The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.

- Neil Gaiman

186. What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish.

187. Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.

- Albert Einstein

188. Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.

189. A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack.

190. Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

191. … and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

- Vincent Van Gogh

192. Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

- Leonardo da Vinci

193. Art is to console those who are broken by life.

- Vincent Van Gogh

194. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

- Michelangelo

195. Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

- Andy Warhol

196. The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

- Alberto Giacometti

197. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline.

198. Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.

199. Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.