Painter Quotes

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter? (Pablo Picasso)
The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen. View quote
Paul Valéry
My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso. View quote
Pablo Picasso
The painter strives and competes with nature. View quote
Leonardo da Vinci
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. View quote
Edgar Degas
A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints. View quote
Pablo Picasso
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. View quote
Susan Sontag
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. View quote
G. H. Hardy
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. View quote
Gertrude Stein
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted. View quote
Henri Matisse
The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them. (Hermann Ebbinghaus)
I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do. View quote
Richard Price
To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art. View quote
J. M. W. Turner
A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are. View quote
Oliver Goldsmith
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. View quote
Claude Monet
The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence. View quote
Leonardo da Vinci
Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of. View quote
Rainer Maria Rilke
Memory is a painter. Paintin's not important. The important thing is keepin' busy. View quote
Grandma Moses
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
At one point Trudeau mentioned to me that the National Gallery wanted to buy a masterpiece by the great Italian painter Lotto, and it needed a million dollars from the Treasury Board. "Is that Lotto-Quebec or Lotto-Canada?" I joked, but I got the message, and the National Gallery got the painting. View quote
Jean Chrétien
Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them. (Emil Nolde)
The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact. View quote
Georges Braque
My name is Schwitters, Kurt Schwitters... I'm a painter and I nail my pictures... I'd like to be accepted into the Dada Club. View quote
Kurt Schwitters
A self-taught painter is one taught by a very ignorant person. View quote
John Constable
Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it. View quote
John Constable