Painting quotes
1.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside painting — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry."
"Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing."
"Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing."
"A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder"
"My goal is to make all my paintings clear and realistic, even more understandable than a photograph."
"The back is like a frame, the front body, the painting that it throws into relief."
"There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing."
"There is no condition that you cannot modify into something more, any more than there is any painting that you can paint and not like and just paint over it again. There are many limiting thoughts in the human environment that make it feel like it is not so, as you have these incurable illnesses, or these unchangeable conditions. But we say, they are only "unchangeable" because you believe that they are."
"My paintings are so legible, I feel guilty."
"There is an aesthetic excitement about painting which is one of the most beautiful experiences that can be. Put things down while you feel that joy."
"Abstract painting is dead. That's why it has become so interesting again."
"Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements."
"Painting and writing are solitary arts."
"How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals."
"It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting."
"Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color."
"My instinct about painting says, 'if you don't think about it, it's right.' As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets."
"Painting is a companion with whom one may walk a great part of life's journey."
"Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else."
"Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes."
