To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Art is an experience, not an object.

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it - would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

The main thing is not to be dead.

It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.

Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it.

I'm a man of faith. I only fear God, and my wife - sometimes.

Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.

If we look at the world with a love of life, the world will reveal its beauty to us.

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

The key thing to understand is that solar activity causes shifts in the jet stream with consequent changes in weather patterns and triggers processes that lead to storm formation.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

This moment is always the best one in which to express your care for others.

Wise men, like wine, are best when old; pretty women, like bread, are best when young.

I need problems. A good problem makes me come alive.