"Everything you can imagine is real."
— Pablo Picasso

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
— Pablo Picasso

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
— George Bernard Shaw

"A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
— Albert Einstein (Albert Einstein)

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

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
— Pablo Picasso

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television."
— Woody Allen

"Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know. "
— Groucho Marx

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."
— Edgar Degas

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
— Oscar Wilde

"I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot."
— Steve Martin

"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents."
— Bob Ross

"There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun"
— Pablo Picasso

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."
— Alice Walker

"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams."
— Yann Martel (Self)

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
— Dylan Thomas

"The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define."
— Ani DiFranco

"All art is quite useless. "
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted."
— Emily Dickinson (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson)

""What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.""
— Pablo Picasso

"One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. "
— Leonardo da Vinci

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

"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
— Orson Welles

"An idea is salvation by imagination"
— Frank Lloyd Wright

"The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living…"
— Dione Lucas

"I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had."
— David Lynch

"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

"Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue."
— Jeanette Winterson (Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery)

""What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.""
— Willa Cather

"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

"Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls… searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor… What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece."
— Keith Floyd

"Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?"
— Lucy Grealy

"The greatest artist does not have any concept
Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain
Within its excess, though only
A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it."
— Michelangelo Buonarroti (I Sonetti Di Michelangelo: The 78 Sonnets of Michelangelo with Verse Translation)

"The tools are real. The viewer is real, you, the artist, is real and a part of everything you paint. You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you. All you have to do it with is a brush, some chemical and canvas, and technique."
— Steven Brust

"My first game was a shoot 'em up, but when I designed it I found that creating the world I was going to blow up was more interesting than blowing it up – that's where I came to Sim City."
— Wil Wright

"Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.

It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating.

We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast."
— Owen Barfield

"Of all the various peoples of this world, none leaves the human body in the simple state of nature in which it was born."
— Jacqueline Delange/Michael Leirus

"گاهی دلش می خواست از آنجا دور شود و خود را جایی گم و گور کند...حتی از بیغوله ی تاریک و غمکده اش بدش نمی آمد به شرط این که بتواند با افکار خود تنها باشد و کسی نداند او کجاست..."
— داستا یوفسکی_ابله

"A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line...To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes and in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth -- disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such."
— Joseph Conrad (The Nigger of the Narcissus)

"مي دانم كه شب مثل روز نيست...مي دانم كه همه چيز فرق مي كند...موضوع هاي شب را نمي توان در روز بيان كرد...براي اينكه ديگر وجود ندارند و شب ممكن است براي مردمان تنها همين كه تنهاييشان آغاز شد...وحشتناك باشد"
— همينگوي