Wisdom from History's Greatest Artists

Everything is art. Everything is politics.

Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it.

Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.

If you are true to your own nature, then you will definitely contribute to humanity.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful.

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface; of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

It's hard to be creative and it's also hard not to think what you do is creative.

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

Steal like an artist.

Art graffiti is a crime, and should be punished. Commercial graffiti is free speech.

A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.

I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.

Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a cutting knife to it.

In the future everyone will be a foundation for fifteen minutes.

The most radical gesture of art is its own existence.

Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions.

My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects.

I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that's it. Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically it's the incredible happiness of working and living that life.

The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know.

I started Transcendental Meditation in 1973 and have not missed a single meditation ever since.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy.

People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.

I can only achieve a small part of what I want. But I will go on and on, as I always do.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder.

The one thing I fear is doing a painting that's already been done, or doing a painting that looks like it belongs to what's accepted as 'art.'

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

Feet, what do I need them for If I have wings to fly.

I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.

The meaning of a word — to me — is not as exact as the meaning of a colour. Colours and shapes make a more definite statement than words.

Art must be free in the fullest sense, free from the spirit of the counting-house, free from the spirit of the sacristy.

Expression for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive.

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them.

My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.

I am nature.

Every good painter paints what he is.

The silhouette speaks to the history of the profile portrait, which was used to identify slaves and is connected to the history of physiognomy.

I'm trying to figure out how to take on history and make it into something that's alive.

I stand in front of my paintings the same way I stand in front of the subjects that I paint. I think of the beauty of these people. Even the ugly is beautiful.

I'm decolonizing the old master portrait, taking the position of power and putting a person of color in that position.

My work is about the creation of a type of fantasy.

Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize the public needs art.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

The sculptor represents the forms of nature's bodies with less effort than the painter, but the painter represents the grace of these natural bodies with infinitely greater effort.

Art is a guaranty of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said.

I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.

The subject of pain is the business I am in.

You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.

To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer.

Everything in life is art.

I was interested in ideas - not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.

Art is not about the artwork. It is about the viewer.

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

In my work I deal with the drama of existing. In my work there is no happy ending.

An artist should not lie to himself or to others.

The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions.

If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.

I think that I shall see something new in painting before I die.

I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.

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.

Read my heart for 'the quill cannot express good will.'

I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

All art is quite useless.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective.

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

I have a horror of the word 'flesh,' which has become so shopworn. Why not 'meat' while they're about it? What I like is skin, a young girl's skin that is pink and shows that she has a good circulation.

A painting is not made to be sniffed.

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

I don't take drugs, I am the drug.

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

If something in you yourself says 'you aren't a painter' — IT'S THEN THAT YOU SHOULD PAINT, old chap, and that voice will be silenced too, but precisely because of that.

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort—and disappointment and perseverance.

One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music.

Cobalt is a divine color and there is nothing as fine for putting an atmosphere round things.

Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays.

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions.

The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.

I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, image, form, color, or layout. I'm interested in all of them.

Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny, content.

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.

Our life is our art. Our art is our life.

I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.

With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe.

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.

It seems more powerful to add than to take away.

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.

The regret of my life is that I have not said 'I love you' often enough.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Negativity is the enemy of creativity.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy.

I should like to be famous and unknown.

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

All art is erotic.

I am not interesting. I am a painter who paints every day from morning till night.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

Sometimes people only see horrible, terrible things in my paintings. I tell them to look again, and they may see two elements in my paintings – the horrible things and the nice things.

You get talent when you discover the ground of your pain.

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

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

I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.

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

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

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.

Art is for everybody.

My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world.

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.

Silence is so accurate.

I have not done what I wanted to, but I tried to make a good fight.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.

The pain passes, but the beauty remains.

I arrange flowers so that I may paint them later.

The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning.

Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.

The more I paint, the more I like everything.

I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.

Interpretation is imposed by others. Paintings are to be admired or contemplated, admired without asking what it means. If I had something to say, I would write it down or say it. I don't need painting for that.

Meaning is meaningless to me. I do not care for symbolism and I paint what I paint without meditating on a story.