Great Throughts Treasury

"To point is to know how to put nothing on the canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back."

"Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being victim of what I know? Life is not repetition."

"We are not here to do what has already been done."

"We are troubled by having two selves, the inner and the outer. The outer one is rather dull and lets great things go by."

"We make our discoveries while in the state [of high functioning] because then we are clear-sighted."

"We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other. Help the young artists?find for them means to make their financial ways easier, that they may develop and fruit their fullest?but let us not ask them to please us in doing it."

"We will be happy if we can get around to the idea that art is not an outside and extra thing; that it is a natural outcome of a state of being; that the state of being is the important thing; that a man can be a carpenter and be a great man."

"What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture."

"Whatever you feel or think your exact state at the exact moment of your brush touching the canvas is in some way registered in that stroke."

"When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it."

"Why do we love the sea It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think."

"You form a society: that limits you. Adopt a name, and you've limited yourself again; draw up a constitution and bylaws and you've made a groove, a rut, that hampers your growth. You think you can fix your course and move straight along it. But sometimes the important thing is to strike out sidewise."

"You pass people on the street, some are for you, some are not."

"You will never draw the sense of a thing unless you are feeling it at the time you work."

"You will never find yourself unless you quit preconceiving what you will be when you have found yourself."

"Your only hope of satisfying others is in satisfying yourself. I speak of a great satisfaction, not a commercial satisfaction."

"Your painting is the marking of your progression into nature, a sensation of something you see way beyond the two pretty colors over there. Don't stop to paint the material, but push on to give the spirit."

"Your style is the way you talk in paint."