All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
-James Baldwin Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
-Henry Ward Beecher

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.
-John Berger

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten....
-John Berger, "Miners," exhibition catalogue, 1989; in "Keeping a Rendezvous," 1992.

By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim's most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.
-Anne Dudley Bradstreet, The Prologue

Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
-Sir Thomas Browne "When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art."
-Marc Chagall

"When one buys some of my artwork I hope it is because they will wish to learn from it and not because they think it will match their drapes!"
-Christian Cardell Corbet, 1997

"Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else."
-Leonardo DaVinci

Perspective is the rein and rudder of painting.
-Leonardo DaVinci

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.
-Northrop Frye, “Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype,” second essay, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

"In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters."
-Paul Gauguin

"Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed."
-Kahlil Gibran, "A Handful of Sand on the Shore"

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
-Allen Ginsberg