James Whistler Quotes

43 quotes in 629 categories

• Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation.
• As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound…
• You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say, you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.
• Work alone will efface the footsteps of work.
• We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.
• Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artists is born…
• Hang on the walls of your mind the memory of your successes. Take counsel of your strength, not your weakness. Think of the good jobs…
• The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many.
• The world is divided into two classes - invalids and nurses.
• Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.
• If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would…
• Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a breath on the surface of a pane of glass.
• Art is a goddess of dainty thought, reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal selfishly occupied…
• Truly color is vice! Of course, it can be, and has the right to be one of the finest virtues. Controlled by the strong hand…
• Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics…
• Frederic Leighton to James McNeill Whistler: 'My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy, unfinished state. Why don't you ever finish them?'…
• Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with…
• A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.
• For art and joy go together, with bold openness, and high head, and ready hand - fearing naught and dreading no exposure.
• As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great…

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