| Quote | Author |
| Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. | Andrew Wyeth |
| Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature—the qualities of space and time—in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both. | Daniel Bell (“Technology, Nature, and Society,” The Winding Passage) |
| What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house. | Edward Hopper |
| Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas. | Georges Braque |
| A picture must possess a real power to generate light [and] for a long time now I’ve been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light. | Henri Matisse |
| Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man’s art would also be wild or natural in a good sense. | Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) |
| I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence. | Man Ray (1890–1976) (Man Ray: Photographer, ed. Philippe Sers (1981)) |
| Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me—a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books. | Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) |
| Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting. ATTRIBUTION: Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Spanish artist. remark, Feb. 2, 1964, repr. In Mario De Micheli, Scritti di Picasso (1964). Quoted by artist Renato Guttuso in his journals. | Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) (Quoted by Renato Guttuso) |
| Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. | Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) |
| Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live; science, everything that sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life. Born of the sensibility, it sows and creates it in its turn. It is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life. | Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915) (“Art and Science,” Selected Writings) |
| Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. | Salvador Dali |
| The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury; for the sculptor it is a necessity. | Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968) |
| Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics. | Walter Pater (1839–1894) |
