19th-century Artist Quotes

Painting is a lot harder than pickin' cotton. Cotton's right there for you to pull off the stalk, but to paint, you got to sweat your mind.

Clementine Hunter

Th' thing I like about general practitioners is that you don't have t' let 'em know a week ahead when you're goin' t' be sick.

Methods of locomotion have improved greatly in recent years, but places to go remain about the same.

Happiness is like time and space-we make and measure it ourselves; it is as fancy, as big, as little, as you please, just a thing of contrasts and comparisons.

George du Maurier

I don't care for Lady Macbeth in the streetwalking scene.

Edward Linley Sambourne

In my Kosmis there will be no feeva of discord... all my immotions will function in hominy and kind feelings.

George Herriman

A toothache, not to be perverse, Is an unmitigated curse...

Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

But that is exactly what I like about this science of geology. It is infinite, ambiguous, like all poetry; like all poetry it has secrets, is permeated by them, lives within them, without being destroyed by them. It does not lift the veil, but only moves it, and through tiny holes in the fabric a few rays escape, which dazzle the eye.

Rodolphe Töpffer

I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures that will love and live in life-like manner and be far more interesting and wonderful than pictures you now see on canvas. I think if Michelangelo was alive today he would immediately see the wonders...The artist can make his scenes and characters live instead of stand still on canvas in art museums.

I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

To the inhabitants of Warsaw - We wage war only against hostile troops, NOT against peaceful citizens.

Words and Deeds. Cartoon Caption

I am in a very unsettled condition, as the oyster said when they poured melted butter all over his back.

Child-ren, behold the Chim-pan-zee; He sits on the an-ces-tral tree From which we sprang in ag-es gone. I'm glad we sprang: had we held on, We might, for aught that I can say, Be horrid Chim-pan-zees to-day.

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

Aubrey Beardsley

I think if she lived in A little shoe-house That little old woman was Surely a mouse!

A wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art.

Project your mind into your subject until you actually live in it.

To marry and have children is the ideal life for a woman. What career could ever be as fine? To give the world splendid men and women-isn't that the noblest thing a woman could possibly do?

Jessie Willcox Smith

To have known the man was even as great a treat as to read his books. Lewis Carroll was as unlike any other man as his books were unlike any other author's books. It was a relief to meet the pure simple, innocent dreamer of children, after the selfish commercial mind of most authors.

There is an implied warranty that a commissioned work should last a lifetime. There is to be no charge.

Maxfield Parrish

The last hour from midnight had lost half its quarters, and the stars went lifting up the great minutes...

Clemence Housman

There is much wisdom that may be learned before a peat fire.

Ellen Bernard Thompson Pyle

The thing to be wished for, is not that the mountains should become easier, but that men should become wiser and stronger.

I hope the time will never come when I shall feel satisfied. To reach the goal of one's ambitions must be tragic.