If you hear a voice within you saying, "You are not a painter," then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced.
- Vincent Van Gogh
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, Author's Note, Life of Pi
My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.
- Michelangelo
A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.
- Albert Camus
Arrange what pieces come your way.
- Virginia Woolf
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
- Marcel Proust
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
- Mark Twain
Art teaches nothing except the significance of life.
- Arthur Miller
Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.
- James G. Huneker
Beauty will save the world.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.
- Zimbabwe proverb
I don't want music to be a matter of comfort but of expansion of the spirit.
- Violinist Gidon Kremer, as quoted in The Guardian
We have art in order not to die of life.
- Albert Camus
I paint in order not to cry.
- Paul Klee
Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual.
- Isadora Duncan
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
-Pablo Picasso
As a suffering creature, I cannot do without something greater than I -- something that is my life -- the power to create.
- Vincent Van Gogh
We have art so that we may not perish by the truth.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Pablo Picasso
A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.
- Paul Gardner
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
Art is a lie that helps us to realize the truth.
- Pablo Picasso
Art is the closest thing to running away, without ever leaving home.
- Twyla Tharp
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
- Edward Hopper
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
- Rene-Francois-Ghislain Magritte
I shut my eyes in order to see.
- Paul Gauguin
The only cats worth anything are the cats who take chances. Sometimes I play things that I never heard myself.
- Thelonius Monk
I believe it is impossible to make sense of life in this world except through art.
- Daniel Pinkwater
One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world -- to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable.
- Oliver Sacks
When I can no longer create anything, I'll be done for.
- Coco Chanel
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
- Friedrich Nietzsche