Paint Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.

When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing tastes, interests and capacity of his audience. These no less than the language, the marble, the paint, are part of his aw material.; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius, it is laziness and incompetence.

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.

Henry David Thoreau

It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas, and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. I wonder why that is. Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel?

Painters, do not fear perfection. You will never achieve it! If you are mediocrities, you may try as you will to paint terribly badly, but people will still see that you are mediocre.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints.

Rudyard Kipling

Because in the modern physics everything is weak, every proton and neutron is surrounded of weakness, of nothing. In this moment the most fantastic thing in physics is le anti-matter. Every new physician talk about anti-matter, and Dali paint, 20 years ago, le first anti-matter angels.

It is very easy to say that your opponents have been guilty of a breach of faith, but it is a great mistake to splash the paint about so freely that your words cease to have any real meaning and cease to carry any sense of affront even to those to whom they are applied and cease to bear any connection with any genuine feeling of indignation on the part of those on whose behalf they are spoken.

Winston Churchill

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

Vincent van Gogh

Painting a picture is like fighting a battle; and trying to paint a picture is, I suppose, like trying to fight a battle. It is, if anything, more exciting than fighting it successfully. But the principle is the same.

Winston Churchill

A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard as he has to represent it by the attitude and movement of the limbs.

Leonardo da Vinci

If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling…the question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: Is holiness there? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to move to this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike for this particular door-keeper?

It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.

Vincent van Gogh

With the color that paints the morning and evening clouds that face the sun I saw then the whole heaven suffused.

Dante Alighieri

Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?

Rudyard Kipling

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories— and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures.

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.

Ralph Waldo Emerson