Battle against obscurity.
We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other. Help the young artists – find for them means to make their financial ways easier, that they may develop and fruit their fullest – but let us not ask them to please us in doing it.
Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.
Do whatever you do intensely.
Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.
I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.
Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. A worker or painter should enjoy his work, else the observer will not enjoy it.
Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being victim of what I know? Life is not repetition.
Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth.
Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.
There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.
When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.
What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture.
Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.
A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don’t confuse a drawing with a map.
A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw.
An artist must first of all respond to his subject, he must be filled with emotion toward that subject and then he must make his technique so sincere, so translucent that it may be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it.
When the motives of artists are profound, when they are at their work as a result of deep consideration, when they believe in the importance of what they are doing, their work creates a stir in the world.
All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.