The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.
Paul Cezanne

The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Plato

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
Dale Carnegie

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Abraham Lincoln

The history of art is the history of revivals.
Samuel Butler

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Paul Gauguin

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
David Hockney

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Ellen Key

The most profound things are inexpressible.
Jenny Holzer

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
Ansel Adams

The object of art is to give life a shape.
William Shakespeare

The perfection of art is to conceal art.
Marcus Fabius Quintilian

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.
Jerzy Kosinski

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.
Jerzy Kosinski

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

The real art of conducting consists in transitions.
Gustav Mahler

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.
Elbert Hubbard