True artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
Whoever wants to know something about me - as an artist which alone is significant - they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.
Every human being should be an artist. Everything can become beautiful art.
Great artists have no country.
Art is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth.
As an artist, you should not wish to create what you don’t feel you have to create.
Every artist was first an amateur.
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say. I have sometimes heard painters say that they paint 'for themselves': but I think they would soon have painted their fill if they lived on a desert island.
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
The artist can wish for nothing better than blunt friends and polite enemies.
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
An unhappy nation makes great artists.
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.
The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.
