Paint Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Oh, I hate the thought of all those costumes and grease paint! When I think that characters like Kundry will now have to be dressed up, those dreadful artists' balls immediately spring into my mind. Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theatre!

I do what many dream of, all their lives,
— Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive — you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat —
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) — so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.

Robert Browning

Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it.

If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, and a sign on it saying, "End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE TO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release. By crisis by no means limited to a morbid state, but could just as easily be an ecstatic impulse.

Perhaps the people I choose to paint are often objects of derision celebrity is a bit of a put-down term, isn't it? But to me they are my world.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

I came into DreamWorks looking to direct. I was hoping to go through story as a way toward directing, because that's how it worked at Disney, story people became heads of story, and heads of story became directors. And they said, 'Right now we don't have a lot of story, but we have visual development,' and I said, 'Good, I paint!'

The thoughts we choose to think are the tools we use to paint the canvas of our lives.

If you don't like the scene you're in, if you're unhappy, if you're lonely, if you don't feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop.

Her father doted upon her and thought her the most accomplished young woman of the age; for certain, she could play a little, and sing a little, and paint a little, and talk a little very bad French, and dance and dress a great deal.

Mary Russell Mitford

People say of such-and-such a painter that he has great command of his brush. Might it not be more correct to say that he is controlled of his brush? Merely for the satisfaction of his vanity, to paint brilliantly and display skill with the brush, he has sacrificed the nobler considerations of naturalness and truth – and thus achieved sorry fame as a brilliant technician.

Caspar David Friedrich

The new masters paint a subject as they please,
And Veronese is prosecuted by the Inquisition
For the dogs playing at the feet of Christ,
The earth is a planet among galaxies.
Later Christ disappears, the dogs disappear: in abstract
Understanding, without adoration, the last master puts
Colors on canvas, a picture of the universe
In which a bright spot somewhere in the corner
Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.

Randall Jarrell

If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures … and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes,' and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy.

James Branch Cabell

Never paint except with the three primary colors [red, blue, and yellow] and their derivatives.

Camille Pissarro

Even the blue-and-white Delftware tile is back up on the wall because, when you took it down, the pale square of paint behind it broke your heart.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.

Willem de Kooning

Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.
That's not an answer.
There isn't any answer.
How long hasn't there been any answer?
As long as I can remember.
And how long have you written?
As long as I can remember.
I mean poetry.
So do I.

You're really not right, are you? Yeah, I know. It was all the paint chips I ate as a kid. They were good, but chromosomally damaging. (Nick)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

The word composition moved me spiritually and I made it my aim in life to paint a 'composition'. This word affected me like a prayer.

Wassily Kandinsky

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.

When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

P. G. Wodehouse

I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be.

I'll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It's the silence that scares me. It's the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.

Mark Lawrence (author)