I don’t believe art is available; it’s rare and curious and should be completely isolated; one is more aware of its magic the more it is isolated.
Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.
The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance – if it is not irrational, you make illustration.
Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.
We only have our nervous system to paint.
Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas.
I’m just trying to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous system as I can.
I loathe my own face, and I’ve done self-portraits because I’ve had nobody else to do.
Base and crafty cowards are like the arrow that flieth in the dark.
Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical.
The bee enclosed and through the amber shown Seems buried in the juice which was his own.
If vices were profitable, the virtuous man would be the sinner.
But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.
Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn.
In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts.
It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.
Every person born in the USA is endowed with life, liberty, and a substantial share of the national debt.
The mold of our fortunes is in our own hands.
He of whom many are afraid ought himself to fear many.
Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.