Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.
Jean Dubuffet

I can alchemize what wounds me into art.
Truman Capote

Serenity is the soul enemy of the artist.
Lani Picard

Pop Art resulted in a bold external expression of pure arrogance.
Lani Picard

You had to feel sorry for yourself to create abstract art.
Robert Rauschenberg

The Sixties kaleidoscopic art scene was a painful rebirth of play from the feel-sorry-for-me art of the Forties and Fifties.
Lani Picard

It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said.
Jackson Pollock

As an artist you’re looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I’m striving for both.
Damien Hirst

All artists are vain, they long to be recognised and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.
Francis Bacon

"The struggle of the mind to keep itself free from every sort of bondage -- to remain curious, open, unsatiated in all its relations with nature -- is tenfold more difficult than the cultivation of a stable, satisfying point of view, but a thousandfold more precious."
Gardner Murphy

Kaloust Guedel has found a territory of artistic expression beyond the bounds of intensity. His work tackles a force unknown.
Lani Picard

It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the
world what he has to say.
MC Escher

Question everything, know all you can - believe nothing.
Lani Picard

Without the voice of thought, wonder would not exist.
Lani Picard

A creative mind can be an escape or a prison.
Lani Picard

“Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.”
Stephen R. Covey
 
"The higher evolution of Humankind will belong to those who are kind."
Lani Picard

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug;
it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and
pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love.
Francis Bacon

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
Rene Magritte

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde

"...for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place."
Rainer Maria Rilke

There is no excuse for small thinking - we have infinite minds.
Lani Picard

Life is a 'metatomic' process, not a 'secret'.
Lani Picard

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."
Diane Ackerman

I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing
basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
Mark Rothko

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Robert Hughes - Art Critic

Intuition whispers true: we’re not dust, we’re magic!
Richard Bach

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.
Hans Hofmann
 
"Insolence and ignorance shown by others can be the best fuel for fierce determination."
David Kontra

I feel that making art is like dreaming on purpose...
Tony Brown

Time does not pass
Words pass.
Jasper Johns

“The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual – as we think so will we act.”
Martha Graham

If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
Vincent van Gogh

The greatest work of a creative artist begins where and when everyone else leaves off.
Lani Picard

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake

Great art can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot

The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because 
he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.
Wyndham Lewis

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
Mark Rothko

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know
anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
Jean Michel Basquiat

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
Leonardo DaVinci

Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often
than not work is salvation.
Chuck Close

When photography's good, let me put it that way, it's as good as painting.
Clement Greenberg

Art is dead.
Lani Picard

I am sure that Einstein's ultimate contemplation was to find a working equation for the 'idea' itself.
Lani Picard

Genius is childhood recalled at will.
Charles Baudelaire
"Each painting is an episode in a personal history, an entry in a journal," and "My work in its entirety is like a symphony in which each painting has its part."
Clifford Still

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows
what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do
directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.
Philip Guston

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can
hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
Willem de Kooning

To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life.
Egon Schiele

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.
Henry Moore

Art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space.
Marcel Duchamp
La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever.
(You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.)
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery
I was probably born with the ability to draw, but that does not make you an artist.
James Rosenquist

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter
was the person behind the mask.
Robert Motherwell

When nations grow old, the arts grow cold, and commerce settles on every tree.
William Blake

I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was
important for me to see whether I was working abstractly
because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was
doing it out of choice.
Robert Rauschenberg

Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible.
Paul Klee

Listen to the song of life.
Katherine Hepburn

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Always feel better than your "Art".
Lani Picard

I make movies for personal therapy in the same way
that a person in an institution is given baskets to
weave because the therapy is good for you.
Woody Allen

The main thing is to last!
Yves Saint Laurent

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such
a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!
Paul Gauguin

An artist is a stimulator of thought.
Lani Picard
My Theory of Everything, Dr. Einstein: E = e¥
Lani Picard

There is no reason to life without purpose.
Albert Einstein

Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.
Constantin Brancusi 1876-1957

Mastery does not come from dabbling. We have to be prepared to pay the price. We need to have the sustained enthusiasm that motivates us to give our best.
Eknath Easwaran

Man separates himself from all other species, he uses his sense of consciousness to claim righteousness and self importance within the animal kingdom. He controls cages and consumes any species of animal in anyway he sees fit. For pleasure power ego and exploitation. To do so he avoids his own consciousness by learning to lie to himself, he uses all his creations to distance himself from responsibility for the actions that his conscious deems wrong. Along the way he creates right and wrong to justify his actions and control the actions of other who might threaten him. He creates a god in his own image to take ultimate responsibility for those things he would rather not claim, religion is mans ultimate scapegoat. Man creates angels and devils to guide him in an attempt to keep his lying conscious from getting him into too much trouble, and to blame for the actions he himself can not excuse.. He seeks to control and secure his life at every turn believing he deserves more with each new day. He works and saves to achieve more and more control over his life, he follows trends and ideas through popular opinion, he uses the opinions of the masses to secure his sense of righteousness. He then builds on these ideas to further separate himself from nature and even the rest of mankind.. All along caging himself, feeling more and more alone, feeling more and more afraid and confused with the world around him.. Fighting wars he does not understand. Paying taxes to a system he knows only as empire.. Breaking down all that is around him in terms of money class control ownership laws morals rules and gods all created and explained by his surroundings. When and if he stops to think for himself he will realize he is responsible for his own entrapment, and the animals he thinks he is above are free making all decisions based on personal instinct. The only true right or wrong. A personal decision made out of basic survival.
Jesse Reno

Art is not so much talent as character.. it's what you are, the qualities of the person.
John Olsen

Imagination is the key to creativity. Take all the possibilities you've ever noticed and weave them together.
Anonymous

Poetry is not an expression of emotion, but an escape from emotion.
T. S. Eliot

Silence is so accurate.
Mark Rothko

We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb
 
I don't really trust ideas, especially good ones. Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.
Robert Rauschenberg

An empty canvas is a living wonder...far lovelier than certain pictures.
Wassily Kandinsky

Knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes.
Panchatantra, fifth century A.D.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche

No canvas is blank.
Lani Picard

The depth of our internal view is equivalent to the vastness of our external view. How far in all directions do you see?
Lani Picard

Through the minds of mediocrity, the artist is perceived more as a coward then a creative.
Lani Picard

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
Robert Motherwell 

Ideas either come or they don't come.
Jasper Johns

Life is a perfect mess.
Lani Picard

All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.
Carl Gustav Jung

He can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command.
Carl Gustav Jung

When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light- you'll never forget it.
Carl Edward Sagan

"No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination."
Edward Hopper

"When we conger up a dream from within our vessel of creative innocence, all things are possible."
Lani Picard

"My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic."
Keith Haring

"Your creativity is like a story; it needs a voice, a way to be heard in the world. Creativity has moved into your hut. Creativity is part of your future life. People think that creativity is like stories, that it is outside of them, like truth or power. But it inhabits you like your own life force, and it animates your being. Creativity is within the crystal palace of your mind. You are about to go on a long journey. It is called your life. You will learn to heal the evil forces of darkness. You are a warrior in the fight against ignorance. The dark sorcerers in life are created within each of us when we live a life of unexpressed creativity, when we live someone else's truth and not our own. Define your own creativity and live that creativity
in the world."
Lynn Andrews

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
Oscar Wilde

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist."
Oscar Wilde

"If you are unhappy, you can not be healthy. Advice: Start Laughing!"
Lani Picard

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it."
Chinese Proverb

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
Nietzsche

What I am looking for.. is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term "mute music".
Joan Miro

The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense.
Pablo Picasso

"If we felt what we said...we could say less and mean more."
unknown
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
Charles Baudelaire

Na Arean sat alone in space as a cloud that floats in nothingness. He slept not, for there was no sleep; he hungered not, for as yet there was no hunger. So he remained for a great while, until a thought came to his mind. He said to himself, "I will make a thing."
a myth from Maiana, Gilbert Islands

We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if
I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
Pablo Picasso

"I will always be kind to those I interact with and try to make them smile. That will be the imprint I leave behind. I don't need to conquer the world.........that is for the greedy and malicious. Just being....... is sometimes enough."
Christopher Ryan Moylen

"If you are afraid of losing something, then you are dependent on it. If you are not afraid, then you are free."
Sylvie Guillem

"Remember your wildness."
Lani Picard

"Imagination is the key to creativity. Take all the possibilities you've ever noticed and weave them together."
Unknown

Now whatever I create, I create it about me, by me and for me...period.
Lani Picard

"When you lose your eyesight, increase your insight."
John Henrik Clarke

"Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.”
Robert Wieder

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
Albert Einstein

"The fine art of painting, which is the bastard of alchemy, always has been always will be, a game. The rules of the game are quite simple: in a given arena, on as many psychic fronts as the talent allows, one must visually describe, the center of the meaning of existence."
Brett Whiteley

"Art makes me transparent, an internal excavation. Some days it's Gold and some days it's mud.  Either way, that's who I am and it will always be a perfect thumb print of my soul."
Kelly Moore

"Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark."
Henri Frederic Amiel
"Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul."
Henri Matisse

"Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask."
Robert Motherwell

"When I need a creative mentor, I excavate one from the grave. They can't produce anymore mistakes."
Lani Picard

"A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave."
Henri Matisse

"Matisse, like all artists, has moments of confidence and then moments of doubt. And that has a lot to do with modernism. Mearleau-Ponty wrote this great essay called “Cezanne's Doubt” that’s about how self-doubt is actually one of the principal ingredients of modernism, because if you feel comfortable with what you’re doing, then you do it in a way which is rote and formulaic. And if you don’t feel comfortable with what you're doing, if you’re your own worst critic, and if you chose to pit yourself against other artists who you perceive as being stronger, then your chance of actually doing something original and important is much better."
Rick Brettell

“I must break away from tradition, break away from beauty, from sentimentality. This is my drama.”
Pablo Picasso
 
“The personality of the artist asserts itself through the struggles it has to go through when pitted against other personalities. If the fight is fatal, it is a matter of destiny.”
Henri Matisse

"To participate in a painting is an experience similar to a dream-state, a level of acceptance apart from everyday reality." 
Doug Higgins

"A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art."
Paul Cezanne

"A good artist does not need anything."
Ad Reinhardt

"...The path shall flow yet the traveler be still."
Larry Bell

"...Because I say anybody who does creative art is a sacred person."
Man Ray
 
"The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."
T. S. Eliot, Tradition and Individual Talent

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
Oscar Wilde

"The most pathetic person in the world is the person who has sight, but no vision."
Helen Keller

For me, Abstract Expressionism is the innocence of expressing what I cannot see.
Lani Picard

"The mind and the heart...what an enigma!"
Charlie Chaplin

"Ask the experienced rather than the learned."
Arabic proverb

"Within everything is the seed of everything."
unknown 

"Courage is often mistaken for insanity."
unknown

Create what you are for the future of another's now.
Lani Picard

Tune yourself in...the harmonics of thought compose the music in the mind.
Lani Picard

Said of Aristotle; he lived, he thought; he died. What I say of myself is: she was; she is; she was; she is again. What will you say of you?
Lani Picard

"Only the pure of heart can make a good soup."
Ludwig van Beethoven

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own."
Jackson Pollock

"I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything....and then make something."
Keith Haring

"Genius is illuminated by love."
Lani Picard

"Atoms are atoms. The only difference between you and me is what I do with what I think."
Lani Picard

"Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets."
Jacques Derrida

"To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light..."
Emerson

"The sufferings of life, are the joys of art."
Twentieth Century, 1934 starring Carole Lombard and John Barrymore

"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."
Sigmund Freud

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
Henry Ward Beecher

"Expression is the impression of what is received from the rhythm our inner strings."
Lani Picard

"Everyone should create a museum of their own, sit back and relish in it."
Lani Picard

"The emotion in my work often comes from somewhere deep down, and can speak to the inner part of each person. I've found that a good painting is one you can internalize, one in which a given element or the work as a whole means something special to you - perhaps in ways you might not admit to another person."
Gregory Deane, abstract artist

The better the art - the less there is to say about it.
Lani Picard

"There is nothing better than making art." 
Lani Picard

"Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. 
Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in, at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen."
Leonardo DaVinci

"When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed"
Bill Evans, jazz pianist

"The way not to feel lonely and afraid is to think about love all the time." 
Agnes Martin, abstract expressionist

"I've always been an optimist. I call it above the line. Beneath the line is all unhappiness and everything. I don't paint about that, or about grief or anything like that. Only the positive counts in this life---the good things that make people happy."
Agnes Martin, abstract expressionist

Creativity is the initial desire/emotion/intent to search for an original idea. Imagining is the actually searching for it...the dreaming aspect. However the imagination, itself, is the primal realm to go shopping for it...the Big Free Cosmic Mall.
Lani Picard

Creativity is released most divinely when the mind is cornered between shame and greatness of self.
Lani Picard

"The mind was born to work - to seek out 'every' thing within the imagination and make it real."
Lani Picard

"If we study Japanese Art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? In studying the distance between the earth and moon? No. In studying Bismark's policy? No. He studies a single blade of grass."
Vincent Van Gogh

Words do not teach. A teacher is merely an agitator within the infinite machinations of dormant thought.
Lani Picard

"Ever since the entertainment media began linking art with itself...i.e., "Arts and Entertainment"...real art began a quiet exodus out of the mass stream of consciousness."
Lani Picard

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. 
So throw off the bowlines. 
Sail away from the safe harbor. 
Catch the trade winds in your sails. 
Explore. 
Dream. 
Discover.
Mark Twain

...self and enemy are not, perhaps, so different at the core.
Sun Tzu

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all 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.
Albert Einstein

"No one can be a unique individual until one knows who they are. Defining oneself should be a personal priority."
  Lani Picard

"Be in love with your life every detail of it."
Jack Keroac

"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder."
M.C. Escher

"the dullard sees no eros in fine champagne; the sorcerer can fall intoxicated on a glass of water"
Hakim Bey

"Charlie...remember what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted...He lived happily ever after." 
Willy Wonka - Willy
 Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
Ellen Parr

"Children's Formative Years --- those years when physical man tramples the intuitiveness out of the child."
Abraham - Hicks

"I want to be like the sun which has no envy over whom it shines."
Lani Picard
"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated."
Auguste Rodin
 
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
Michelangelo

"One of the great lessons to be learned from Jackson Pollock, or any other great artists work, is that the art of painting is a higher form of language -- a literary vision pulled from the great unknown."
ARTIST HARRY HILSON c-1997-2001

Great artists have an element of chance in their talent, and there is also talent in their chance." 
Victor Hugo - 1865

The look of love alarms
Because 'tis fill'd with fire;
But the look of soft deceit
Shall win the lover's hire.
William Blake

Art should be appetizing and delicious...creating the feeling of insatiable hunger.
Lani Picard

Giving title to a piece of art is like branding a newborn baby with a hot iron...it scars the skin forever.
Lani Picard

"The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps...so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in."
Dylan Thomas

"Accidents – try to change them – it’s impossible. The accidental reveals the man."
Pablo Picasso

"Painting makes me do what it wants."
Pablo Picasso

"Art is not chaste. It should be kept away from ignorant innocents. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Yes, art is dangerous. And if it is chaste, it is not art."
Pablo Picasso

Listen to the voice on the wind. It might be Mattise or Wilde or Einstein. The departed can teach you great things.
Lani Picard

"All my work is dependent on color and composition. I believe the most complex emotions can be evoked from the simplest of forms. My style explores the relationship between man-made structures and the natural world; the idea of recognizable shapes and structures living within irrational thoughts and emotions."
Shawn McNulty

Art isn't timeless unless it simultaneously straddles both ears; the sacred and the profane.
Lani Picard

I didn't travel two million light years to turn back now.
Lani Picard

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.
Henry Miller

To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized.
Simone de Beauvoir

It's a great day when you read a quote, love what it says and realize it was your own.
Lani Picard

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Friedrich Nietzsche

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. 
And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.
Friedrich Nietzsche

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
Albert Einstein

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a whole book
Friedrich Nietzsche 

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-92), Hungarian-born US biochemist.

"I do not want ART for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few."
William Morris

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
Linus Pauling

Every good painter paints what he is.
Jackson Pollock

The big artist...keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.
Thomas Eakins

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
James McNeill Whistler

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. 
Michelangelo

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. 
Joan Miro

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. 
Charlie Chaplin

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.
Roy Lichtenstein

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, 
transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Mondrian

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
Albert Einstein

What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
Eugene Delacroix

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
Edgar Degas

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
Rene Magritte

There is no must in art because art is free.
Wassily Kandinsky

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and commonsense will only interfere. 
But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams."
Giorgio DeChirico

I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin

The painting has a life of its own.
Jackson Pollock

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Degas

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
Pablo Picasso 

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
Camille Pissarro

It takes a very long time to become young.
Pablo Picasso

I just feel that I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working.
Louise Nevelson

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.
James Mcneill Whistler

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"
Howard Ikemoto

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.
Henri Matisse

Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.
Louise Nevelson

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Henri Matisse

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
Michaelangelo

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.
Gustave Courbet 

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. 
Leonardo da Vinci 

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death. 
Leonardo da Vinci 

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; 
united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Francisco Goya 

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, 
or sees them differently. 
Eugène Delacroix 

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Salvador Dali 

When I feel a little confused the only thing to do is to turn back to the study of nature before launching once again into the subjects closest to heart.
Raoul Dufy 

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
Michelangelo 

A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it. 
Michelangelo 

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. 
Michelangelo 

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.
Auguste Rodin 

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
Auguste Rodin 

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, 
for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures. 
Vincent Van Gogh 

In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature. 
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec 

In the mind of an artist, a vacation is working without interruption.
Lani Picard

Creating is a deliberate act of allowing the energy of desire to flow through you.
Lani Picard

Art cannot be taught, art can only be sought.
Lani Picard

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Picasso

The infinite source of any manifestation must be invisible, silent and neutral...anything else is an invention of man...and deserves question.
Lani Picard

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
Thomas Paine

Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and 
dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.
Herbert Ott

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
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The question is not of finding in your thoughts what is right and what is wrong, in your actions what is right and what is wrong. The question is of finding a consciousness so total and so intense that only whatever is right remains, and whatever is false burns out. You don't have to decide.
Osha

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs; we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.
P.J O'Rouke

Awe is the harvest of a keen eye.
Lani Picard

Just walk. The road knows where you are going.
Arne Nyman

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
Sir Issac Newton

Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties.
Chopin

Be where you are.
unknown

Give Yourself Credit Even If You Don't Believe It's Due. Art is subjective. 
No-one has to buy your art for it to be valid, and it may take a while before people "get" what you're doing. 
Pat yourself on the back along the way for having the guts to get out there in the first instance. 
Give yourself credit for creating. If you've actually done something, anything, you're ahead of the game. 
Most people think about it. Very few actually do it.
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There is so much more space inside than outside.
Lani Picard 

 Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.
Robert Frost

Who are you?” said the caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied rather shyly, 'I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.
Lewis Carroll

Does not matter what matter you produce as in why. I rather look at a sparkling toilet, then a Picasso. A clean and solitary toilet shouts of reason...nothing nose-pinchingly pretentious about it. It's common art - it works for everyone.
Lani Picard

You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving."
Franz Kline

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
Bernard Berenson, 1897

"I think artists imagination is bound to simplicity and as a rule is in conflict with common sense.
Kaloust Guedel

Everyone is an artist. Art advertises both the the soul and the ego. That's all art does.
Lani Picard

"Consider yourself enlightened if you can envision life as a drenched and dramatic choreography of rhythmic thought in motion.  Anything less, consider your self still asleep."
Lani Picard

For those who love to make excuses:
If you can breathe you can live
If you can think you can do
If you can sleep you can dream
If you can sit you can play
If you can crawl you can move
If If you can move you can dance
If you can talk you can sing
If you can draw you can write
If you can write you can draw
If you can feel you can do anything
Just do something.
Lani Picard

Whenever a rude awakening occurs - it's an eclipse to behold!
Lani Picard

People are crazy and times are strange...
Bob Dylan

Music is the language of movement.
Lani Picard

No one but a woman can teach the silence of herself.
Jane Austen: Mansfield Park

We are all part of a pattern we can not perceive - the creative mind seeks to imagine this pattern and recreate it in one form or another.
Lani Picard

Creativity is a powerful way to celebrate who we are. It is a spiritual energy that nourishes our vitality. It is a way to replace negative thinking with positive action. Everyone of us is brimming with imagination, but it often takes practice to find it and put it to use. Yet, anything we do in a new way can be creative. Creative energy is within us and all around us, whether we are writing a masterpiece or folding the laundry. Every original act asserts our commitment to living.
author unknown

There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet.
William Blake

There is absolutely no pride where love lives...none.
Lani Picard

A note's a note in almost every language.
Satchmo: Louis Armstrong

My thoughts are my teachers.
author unknown

Someone once remarked that all 'unknown' authors are women.
Lani Picard

Life can stop you from what you want, but never stop you from yearning.
unknown

If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Ancient Chinese proverb

For every man, the world is as fresh as it was the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them.
Aldous Huxley

Travel into the deep and visit the tributaries of your flowing and sacred mystery. Dive in, swim, swim, swim like a seal and when you are done...rise up and gather the weeds and wild flowers that quilt the sand along the blood-banks of your own veins...your river of life.
Go there everyday, and dance upon the shores to the beat of your heart rhythm...and dream your innocence...relish the moment...
then make it real.
Lani Picard

Every great work of art is offensive to someone, for a work of art is a protest against things as they are and a proclamation of things as they ought to be.
Gerald W. Johnson

The fragrance always remains in the hand that gives the rose.
Heda Bejar

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.
Albert Einstein

A woman's intuition is a man's best friend.
unknown

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
Pablo Picasso

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
"What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," for the October 26, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

If there is an idea, then it must be probable; virtual-reality happening somewhere.
Lani Picard

For when I can love all of me I will love all of you.
Debbie Ford

When 'push comes to shove', the only human being you can count on to identify your personal integrity is yourself.
Lani Picard

We have to be mature and get used to the new chaos. 
We have to be patient with that chaos. 
There is no simple or clear solution for it. 
One of the most important things is sympathy and respect. 
In the war between our network and their network these can go a long way.
Haruki Murakami, writer

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
Emerson (1803-1882)

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
Pascal (1623-1662)

Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.
Shakespeare (1564-1616)

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach, Illusions

I didn't travel over two million light years to turn around now.
Lani Picard, Odyssey of Andromeda; Cosmic Crusader

If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose, a point on which the soul may fix its' intellectual eye.
Mary Shelley

Don't ever begin to believe that when you get to a certain point, you're there. 
Don't ever put a limit to what you want to be, because when you get to that place, you're nowhere.  
Don't ever set yourself a stopping place, because maybe that is just the beginning.
John Held, Jr.

No one can be a unique creature until one knows who they are. Defining oneself should be a personal priority.
Lani Picard

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.
Igor Stravinsky

Instincts...are highly conservative and of extreme antiquity as regards both their dynamism and their form. Their forms, when represented to the mind, appears as an image which expresses the nature of the instinctive impulse visually and concretely, like a picture....
Carl Jung

When you read philosophy, it will give you knowledge; when you meditate, it will give you the experience.
Swami Muktananda

True art cannot be forced. Each of us is a work of art and must be free to be revealed.
Lani Picard

More than science, art reveals the mystery of things.
William Shakespeare

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

We know that a woman in love is working on the lowest level of the intellect.
Spellbound, the movie

...sorcery is a journey of return. We return victorious to the spirit, having descended into hell. And from hell we bring trophies. 
Understanding is one of our trophies.
Don Juan: Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence
 
"In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty...in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe."
Deepak Chopra, Seven Laws of Spirituality

Innocence emerges when the ego of arrogance disarms itself.
Lani Picard

Creativity takes form in one way or another the moment the mind acts upon the emotions - like the wind upon the waters.
Lani Picard

Look well to your dreams, for they are the first step in the creative process.
Charles Roth

While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die -- whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.
Gilda Radner

Let us reject tedious work. It goes against human nature, against the cosmic rhythms, it goes against man himself, to take trouble where none is needed. It is natural for him to apply himself to avoiding such work; to use every instrument that comes to hand, every favorable chance which can help him out, to make his work easier and more pleasant. Tedious work is inhuman and repugnant, every work which shows signs of it is ugly. It is pleasure and ease, without harshness and constraint, which create grace in every human gesture.
An excerpt from Jean Dubuffet's "Notes for the Well-Lettered," Paris, 1967
.
"On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally, 'in' the painting."
Jackson Pollock, 1947

Art happens when all else fails.
Lani Picard

Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.
Polly Berrien Berends

Everything you think eventually becomes realized. Everything else is simply napping in the waiting-room of the mind.
Lani Picard

It is the soul's restlessness with the body that dances are born. It is an expression of the soul's needs to seek flight in an earthbound prison. In this body all the experiences of life are recorded in the soul/body. We must go to the soul level; the place between shadow and light, and the point between inhalation and exhalation. Here we find a place of release, and expression for the soul's discomfort.
Laurence Rawlins, Anima Dance Theatre, New York City

Art should always challenge our assumptions...or it not be art.
Lani Picard

Many people have puzzled over the the secret of creativity. I contend that it is basically no more than the extension into adult life of these vital childlike qualities. The child asks new questions; the adult answers old ones; the childlike adult finds answers to new questions. The child is inventive; the adult is productive; the childlike adult is inventively productive. The child explores his environment; the adult organizes it; the childlike adult organizes his explorations and, by bringing order to them, strengthens them. He creates."
Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo

"To understand the magical nature of the mind is to acquire awesome power. It is to understand that at every moment of our lives, we have the power to accomplish everything we want."
Deepak Chopra

The world is made up of stories, not atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser

"Art is not chaste. It should be kept away from ignorant innocents. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Yes, art is dangerous. And if it is chaste, it is not art.
Pablo Picasso

"I've known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me. And I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times — walking, running, wondering about what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here the dreams started moving in, and I went about devouring them as they devoured me."
Gordon Parks, Photographer, Filmmaker, Poet, Writer, Painter

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
Martin Luther King, Jr., speech, Detroit 1963

When the artist is alive in any person...he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding.
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Creativity is a celebration of one's grandeur, one's sense of making anything possible.
Creativity is a celebration of my life. 
It is a bold statement:
I am here!
I love life!
I love me!
I can be anything!
I can do anything!"
Joseph Zinker, therapist, painter, sculptor, and poet

People who want to be creative, who deeply value such a characteristic in themselves, are more likely to make themselves creative and keep themselves that way...Creativity concerns what we do with our abilities. Any normal person can be creative in terms of whatever abilities he or she has or can acquire."
D.N. Perkins, The Mind's Best Work

Only that fine apparatus which is called the soul of the artist can understand and feel the reflection of the noumenon in the phenomenon. In art it is necessary to study "occultism" - the hidden side of life. The artist must be a clairvoyant: he must see that which others do not see; he must be a magician: must possess the power to make others see that which they do not themselves see, but which he does see.
P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World

Either you can play or you can't.
A Master Musician

Your one and only true and great work in this lifetime is to paddle your own soul through the creative rivers and tributaries of experience home to the peaceful pool of infinity. When you arrive and awaken you will find that all it took was a deep breath.
Lani Picard

The Zen of a heart-warrior is to balance the terror of being human with the wonder of being human.
Lani Picard

Thank you for visiting