"A vandal is somebody who throws a brick through a window. An artist is somebody who paints a picture on that window. A great artist is somebody who paints a picture on the window and then throws a brick through it." - A-One, quoted in New Yorker

"The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking." - Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun

"PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves." - Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere." - G. K. Chesterton

"Every artist writes his own autobiography." - Havelock Ellis

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life." - William Feather

"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography." - Federico Fellini, quoted in Atlantic

"Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue." - Gustave Flaubert, letter (1846)

"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual." - Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

"The object of art is to give life a shape." - JEAN ANOUILH, The Rehearsal

"PAINTING, n.The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic." - AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary

"The history of art is the history of revivals." - SAMUEL BUTLER (d 1902), Note-Books

"Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers, and never succeeding." - MARC CHAGALL, attributed

"Art is a jealous mistress." - RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Conduct of Life

"The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." - JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible." - PAUL KLEE, The Inward Vision

"Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature." - SUZANNE K. LANGER, Mind

"The whole of art is an appeal to a reality which is not without us but in our minds." - DESMOND MACCARTHY, Theatre

"There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun." - PABLO PICASSO, attributed, quoted by Edith Sitwell in Fire of the Mind

"We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand." - PABLO PICASSO, quoted in Dore Ashton's Picasso on Art

"Art is the right hand of nature. The latter only gave us being, but the former made us men." - FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER, Fiesco

"A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it." - SIMONE WEIL, Gravity and Grace

"Art happens; no hovel is safe from it, no Prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy, and coarse farce." - JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." - OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"All art is quite useless." - OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Einstein, Albert in 'What I Believe' 1930

"He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion." - Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832)