To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists. -- Arnold Bennett

In a certain sense every creative person is a reformer, but this does not mean that he must be in his work a propagandist for good roads, shorter hours, and a low tariff. All these are excellent things, but they need not be the concern of the artist. -- Heywood Broun

The artist has one function--to affirm and glorify life. -- W. Edward Brown

The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone -- Michelangelo Buonarroti

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth. -- Joseph Campbell

In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody. -- Henri Cartier-Bresson

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. -- Charles Horton Cooley

Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it. -- Edgar Degas

The artist, a traveller on this earth, leaves behind imperishable traces of his being. -- François Delsarte

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness. -- Max Eastman

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between...this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one -- which is really the realm of the artist. -- Federico Fellini

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike. -- Margot Fonteyn

In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world. -- John W. Gardner

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model. -- Vincent van Gogh

My role in society, or any artist or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. -- John Lennon

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. -- Alan Lightman

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

All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superflous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art. -- Pablo Picasso

The artist is a receptacle for the 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

When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you will become a general. If you become a monk, then you will end up as Pope.' Instead, I became a painter, and wound up as Picasso. -- Pablo Picasso

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. -- Katherine Anne Porter

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature. -- Auguste Rodin

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. -- Carl Sagan

All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis. -- Upton Sinclair

The artist should be a seeing-eye dog for a myopic civilization. -- Jacob Getlar Smith

I am an artist. I am here to live out loud. -- Emile Zola

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

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman. -- Emile Zola

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