Artist Quotes

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist

Artists do not need monuments erected for them because their works are their monuments.

You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play.

Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. The moment you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part and the beginning of exaggerated false acting. Therefore, no matter how much you act, how many parts you take, you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a palpitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part.

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

Mother Nature is the true artist and our job as cooks is to allow her to shine.

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist.

I think our duty as American citizens is to be involved and engaged in anything that affects us. As an artist, I have to use my platform, and as a dad, a brother, and a black man, I have to be as socially woke and present as possible.

It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

I work hard. I focus on myself and putting food on my dinner table before anything else. I don't worry about other artists. Worrying about the next person in a negative way is the wrong way to be.

I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that's the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.

The best thing is to always keep honest people around, because when you have a bunch of yes men around that know that you're making a mistake but let you go on with it, that's when it ruins your mind state as an artist.

All artists are constantly looking for something and they don't always know what.

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

Your soul is a seeker, lover and artist; shape-shifting through archetypal energy, between your darkness and fields of light, your body and spirit, your heaven and hell, until you land in the moment of sweet surrender; when you, as a dancer, disappear into the dance.

To be an artist, one must . . . never shirk from the truth as he understands it, never withdraw from life

Beware of artists, they mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous.

I've always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools...I don't see how a history of the United States can be written honestly without including the Negro. I didn't [paint] just as a historical thing, but because I believe these things tie up with the Negro today. We don't have a physical slavery, but an economic slavery. If these people, who were so much worse off than the people today, could conquer their slavery, we can certainly do the same thing....I am not a politician. I'm an artist, just trying to do my part to bring this thing about.

An artist is someone who has learned to trust in himself.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.

I'm so devoted to my music and becoming the best artist I can be. I don't want to devote too much time to anything else before I say I've conquered that. I just wanna become bigger and I'm never satisfied with just what I am today, I just always want to be bigger. If I was Bill Gates, I would double Bill Gates. That's the mindstate you should keep in any profession, just keep striking iron and trying to get bigger and better.