Art quotations

"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish."
Michelangelo

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
Francisco Goya

"Everything in art is an aside."
Ray Bradbury

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

"In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility."
Joseph Conrad

"The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense."
Pablo Picasso

"The hidden harmony is better than the obvious."
Pablo Picasso

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

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God — man — the world — the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars — a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space — and you! ... And you are not you — you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought."
Mark Twain

"Whether the wholly harmonious mind exists - the mind equally balanced between thought and feeling, between intuition and sensation - is perhaps doubtful, but surely that is the ideal towards which we ought to strive. Only such a mind can appreciate the fullness and richness of life. If we come to the conclusion that this complete and harmonious being cannot exist in our modern form of society, then our aim should be to change that form of society until such a life becomes possible. In this great aim, in which the energies of humanity will be absorbed for centuries to come, a right understanding of the nature of art and of the function of the artist is fundamental."
Herbert Read: To Hell with Culture (1963)