Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
Edgar Degas

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce

Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Ambrose Bierce

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.
Edward Steichen

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Dorothea Lange

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
William Wordsworth

Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
Arthur Erickson

Rules and models destroy genius and art.
William Hazlitt

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.
Alexander Pope

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.
James Taylor

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
William Faulkner

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
Walt Whitman

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.
Novalis

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.
Pablo Picasso

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola