Artist Archives - Pictorial Quotes

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Vincent Van Gogh

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

Vincent Van Gogh

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

Vincent Van Gogh

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

Vincent Van Gogh

The way to know life is to love many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Vincent Van Gogh

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

Vincent Van Gogh

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Vincent Van Gogh

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

Vincent Van Gogh

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

Vincent Van Gogh

It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent.

Vincent Van Gogh

Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

Vincent Van Gogh

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Vincent Van Gogh

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Vincent Van Gogh

A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

Vincent Van Gogh

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

Vincent Van Gogh

Conscience is a man’s compass.

Vincent Van Gogh

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

Vincent Van Gogh

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Vincent Van Gogh

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

Vincent Van Gogh

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

Vincent Van Gogh

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

Vincent Van Gogh

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

Vincent Van Gogh

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

Vincent Van Gogh

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

Vincent Van Gogh

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

Vincent Van Gogh

I wish they would only take me as I am.

Vincent Van Gogh

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Vincent Van Gogh

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Vincent Van Gogh

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

Vincent Van Gogh

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Vincent Van Gogh

If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

Vincent Van Gogh

The best way to know God is to love many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

Vincent Van Gogh

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

Vincent Van Gogh

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

Vincent Van Gogh

I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God’s help I shall succeed.

Vincent Van Gogh

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Vincent Van Gogh

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Vincent Van Gogh

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

Salvador Dali

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant’s revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

Salvador Dali

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Salvador Dali

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

Salvador Dali

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

Salvador Dali

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

Salvador Dali

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

Salvador Dali

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.

Salvador Dali

Let my enemies devour each other.

Salvador Dali

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Salvador Dali

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

Salvador Dali

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

Salvador Dali

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.

Salvador Dali

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Salvador Dali

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Salvador Dali

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Salvador Dali

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

Salvador Dali

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Salvador Dali

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

Salvador Dali

Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

Salvador Dali

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Salvador Dali

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

Salvador Dali

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Salvador Dali

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

Salvador Dali

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

Salvador Dali

The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.

Salvador Dali

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

Salvador Dali

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

Salvador Dali

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Salvador Dali

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being .

Salvador Dali

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Salvador Dali

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Salvador Dali

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Salvador Dali

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Salvador Dali

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.

Michelangelo

The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor’s hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.

Michelangelo

The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.

Michelangelo

I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.

Michelangelo

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.

Michelangelo

If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.

Michelangelo

The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of white marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.

Michelangelo

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.

Michelangelo

The more the marbles wastes, the more the statue grows.

Michelangelo

There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.

Michelangelo

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

Michelangelo

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?

Michelangelo

I live and love in God’s peculiar light.

Michelangelo

I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin’s; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

Michelangelo

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

Michelangelo

It is necessary to keep one’s compass in one’s eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.

Michelangelo

Many believe – and I believe – that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.

Michelangelo

Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.

Michelangelo

Even if you are divine, you don’t disdain male consorts.

Michelangelo

It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

Michelangelo

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

Michelangelo

The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.

Michelangelo

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

Michelangelo

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

Michelangelo

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Michelangelo

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

Michelangelo

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.

Michelangelo

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

Michelangelo

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

Michelangelo

I am still learning.

Michelangelo

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

Michelangelo

A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.

Michelangelo

Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.

Michelangelo

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.

Michelangelo

Genius is eternal patience.

Michelangelo

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Michelangelo

I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible.

Michelangelo

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

Leonardo da Vinci

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Leonardo da Vinci

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.

Leonardo da Vinci

I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.

Leonardo da Vinci

Time abides long enough for those who make use of it.

Leonardo da Vinci

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

Leonardo da Vinci

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

Leonardo da Vinci

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Leonardo da Vinci

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

Leonardo da Vinci

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

Leonardo da Vinci

The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.

Leonardo da Vinci

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

Leonardo da Vinci

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

Leonardo da Vinci

Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body.

Leonardo da Vinci

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

Leonardo da Vinci

Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.

Leonardo da Vinci

Our body is dependant on Heaven and Heaven on the Spirit.

Leonardo da Vinci

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

Leonardo da Vinci

Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.

Leonardo da Vinci

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

Leonardo da Vinci

Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

Leonardo da Vinci

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Leonardo da Vinci

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

Leonardo da Vinci

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

Leonardo da Vinci

It’s easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Leonardo da Vinci

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Leonardo da Vinci

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

Leonardo da Vinci

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

Leonardo da Vinci

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

Leonardo da Vinci

The length of a man’s outspread arms is equal to his height.

Leonardo da Vinci

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

Leonardo da Vinci

The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle.

Leonardo da Vinci

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Leonardo da Vinci

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

Leonardo da Vinci

The Medici created and destroyed me.

Leonardo da Vinci

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

Leonardo da Vinci

Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.

Leonardo da Vinci

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

Leonardo da Vinci

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.

Leonardo da Vinci

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

Leonardo da Vinci

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

Leonardo da Vinci

Our life is made by the death of others.

Leonardo da Vinci

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Leonardo da Vinci

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Leonardo da Vinci

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Leonardo da Vinci

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

Leonardo da Vinci

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

Leonardo da Vinci

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Leonardo da Vinci

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

Leonardo da Vinci

Life well spent is long.

Leonardo da Vinci

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

Leonardo da Vinci

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

Leonardo da Vinci

He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Leonardo da Vinci

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

Leonardo da Vinci

I have wasted my hours.

Leonardo da Vinci

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.

Leonardo da Vinci

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

Leonardo da Vinci

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

Leonardo da Vinci

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Leonardo da Vinci

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Leonardo da Vinci

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Leonardo da Vinci

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

Leonardo da Vinci

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

Leonardo da Vinci

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.

Leonardo da Vinci

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

Leonardo da Vinci

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

Leonardo da Vinci

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

Leonardo da Vinci

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Leonardo da Vinci

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Leonardo da Vinci

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

Leonardo da Vinci

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Leonardo da Vinci

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

Leonardo da Vinci

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

Leonardo da Vinci

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Leonardo da Vinci

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

Leonardo da Vinci

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

Leonardo da Vinci

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

Leonardo da Vinci

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Leonardo da Vinci

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

Leonardo da Vinci

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

Leonardo da Vinci

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

Leonardo da Vinci

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.

Leonardo da Vinci

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

Leonardo da Vinci

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Leonardo da Vinci

The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

There are about 30 words around you all the time, like ‘thread’ or ‘exit.’

Jean-Michel Basquiat

The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I like kids’ work more than work by real artists any day.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

If I’m away from painting for a week, I get bored.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was young.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I have a painting where somebody’s holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody’s head.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy. I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

My favorite Twombly is ‘Apollo and the Artist,’ with the big ‘Apollo’ written across it.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Charles Saatchi has never liked my work at all.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Medicine men live in caves.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I’m not a real person. I’m a legend.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I played a guitar with a file, and a synthesizer.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Some days I can’t get an idea, and I think, ‘Man, I’m just washed up,’ but it’s just a mood.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

For a while, I was drawing on good paper, but now I’ve gone back to the bad stuff. I put matte medium on it. If you put matte medium on it, it seals up, so it doesn’t really matter.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I had very few friends. There was nobody I could trust. I left home when I was fifteen. I lived in Washington Square Park.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

My basic influence had probably been Peter Max.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Believe it or not, I can actually draw.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix… I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I thought I was going to be a bum the rest of my life.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I start a picture and I finish it.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

I wanted to build up a name for myself.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

The more I paint the more I like everything.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I’ll do some great, awful painting about her.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

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