"If I had to do it over again I think I'd be a musician. I can spend days, weeks, months and years on an artwork. The audience gives a passing glance or will be mesmerized enough to stare for several moments. At best put my work on a wall and see it in passing everyday and once in awhile stop to ponder for a few moments. But if I were a musician I could have a multitude of people enraptured for hours each in their own abstract perceptions. I would hear applause. I would feel vindicated."

"Some people say that artists that create fakes of masterpieces are so talented they could do so well doing their own works. Well I submit to you that they may be technically fine but they lack the imagination, soul, feeling and fortitude to produce their own works. For they are fakes producing fakes of nothing of their own."

"They say the world is a ghetto. Well then these trees must be high-rise tenements, the streams are sewers, the lakes cesspools and these hills are cheap motels."

"Some people equate being poor with ignorance. Well I'd rather be dirt poor than have that kind of ignorance."

"Some people call me mindless and that's just fine with me. I know it makes them a little more mindful."

"I don't have a basket and I may not have an egg. But, I sure as hell have a mouth. Even though I might not have any food to eat, I've got a whole lot to spit out."

"I asked myself 'what is life?' Then I heard a deep low voice from within that said, 'I don't know. What the hell ya askin' me for.'"

"I was wandering about the wonder when I wondered where is it that I wander."

"The truth is there is no truth. Therefore I am an honest man."

"No matter what our station in life. What we have or don't have. We all strive inside to be one thing. To be one of the good, simple, common folk. At least that's what I would hope we all aspire to be. I know I've been struggling my whole life to accomplish that lofty goal and great achievement."

"When I am alone (as I often am) and I sit and create my art it is a form of exercise. It is an exercise in silent desperation. Desperate for life, desperate for fulfillment, desperate for expression, desperate for divine intervention."

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. ~Pablo Picasso

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. ~Twyla Tharp

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ~Stella Adler

Painting is silent poetry. ~Plutarch, Moralia: How to Study Poetry

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. ~Leonardo da Vinci

It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet. ~Kojiro Tomita

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. ~Amy Lowell

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist. ~Schumann

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. ~Pablo Picasso

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. ~Henri Matisse

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. ~Charles Horton Cooley

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. ~Theodore Dreiser, Life, Art, and America, 1917

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. ~Paul Strand

All art requires courage. ~Anne Tucker

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. ~Oscar Wilde

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. ~Edgar Degas

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. ~Henry Moore

Pictures must not be too picturesque. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. ~André Gide

Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art. ~Wynetka Ann Reynolds

But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy. ~The New Yorker

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. ~Fran Lebowitz

Great art picks up where nature ends. ~Marc Chagall

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ~G.K. Chesterton

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. ~Henry Miller

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. ~Oscar Wilde

Let me ask you something, what is not art? ~Author Unknown

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them. ~Andy Warhol

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. ~Kenneth Tynan

God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh. ~Georges Rouault

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening. ~Aaron Howard

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. ~Georgia O'Keeffe

Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money. ~Ernst Levy

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. ~John Anthony Ciardi

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. ~Pablo Picasso

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~Pablo Picasso

When painting, an artist must take care not to trap his soul in the canvas. ~Dena Groquet

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture. ~Henri Matisse, Notes d'un peintre, 1908

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. ~George Jean Nathan, House of Satan

Art is the colors and textures of your imagination. ~Meghan, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is your personal diary where you may color your thoughts and emotions on a page. ~Sara, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is a shadow of what a person is thinking... a small glimpse of what they hold inside. Little secrets, regrets, joys... every line has its own meaning. ~Sarah, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is your emotions flowing in a river of imagination. ~Devin, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is an adventure that never seems to end. ~Jason, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

Art is pictures straight from the heart. ~Ben, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered. ~Robin Tyler

Art is the triumph over chaos. ~John Cheever

All great art comes from a sense of outrage. ~Glenn Close

Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life. ~Jean Paul Richter

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy

One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie. ~Mark Stevens

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things. ~Pablo Picasso

Art hath an enemy called ignorance. ~Ben Jonson

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. ~Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon. ~Agnes Repplier, Points of View, 1891

Art disturbs, science reassures. ~Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit

Art is the struggle to understand. ~Audrey Foris

As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life. ~John Lubbock

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. ~Loren Eiseley, The Night Country, 1971

Art is spirituality in drag. ~Jennifer Yane

Reflexes and instincts are not pretty. It is their decoration that initiates art. ~Martin H. Fischer

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. ~Willa Cather

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. ~George Santayana

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization. ~Lincoln Steffens

Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~Elbert Hubbard

An artist's career always begins tomorrow. ~James McNeill Whistler

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum. ~Edmond & Jules de Goncourt

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~G.K. Chesterton

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world. ~André Malraux

An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it. ~Paul Valéry

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. ~Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, 1915

A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. ~Oscar Wilde

An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. ~Jean Cocteau, Newsweek, 16 May 1955

The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is. ~Alfred Tonnelle

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus

For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one. ~William McElcheran

An artist must be careful not to throw his ideas out with the trash. ~Dena Groquet

Art is a kind of illness. ~Giacomo Puccini

A great artist is always before his time or behind it. ~George Moore

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. ~Claes Oldenburg

Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres. ~Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt. ~Odilon Redon

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. ~James Russell Lowell

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ~Aristotle

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul - and you answer. ~Star Richés

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. ~Jean Cocteau

Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ~Leonard Bernstein, What Makes Opera Grand?

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild. ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die. ~Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, no. 8

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. ~George Bernard Shaw

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. ~Michelangelo

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid. ~Jules Feiffer

All the other colors are just colors, but purple seems to have a soul. Purple is not just a noun and an adjective but also a verb - when you look at it, it's looking back at you. ~Uniek Swain

Architecture begins where engineering ends. ~Walter Gropius

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. ~G.K. Chesterton

Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier. ~Marie Laurencin

Art is Man's nature. Nature is god's art. ~James Bailey

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. ~John Ruskin

From- http://www.quotegarden.com

There would be:

57 Asians

21 Europeans

14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south

8 would be Africans

52 would be female

48 would be male

70 would be non-white 30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian 30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual 11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.

80 would live in substandard housing

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

(ONE)1 would be near death;

(ONE)1 would be near birth;

(ONE)1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education;

(ONE)1 (yes, only 1) would own computer.

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

And, therefore . . .

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death, you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

If your parents are still alive and still married, you are very rare, even in the United States.

If you can hold someone's hand, hug them, or even touch them on the shoulder, you are blessed because you can offer healing touch.

If you hold up your head with a smile on your face and are truly thankful, you are blessed because the majority can, but most do not.

If you can read this message, you have just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you, and furthermore, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.

As you read this and are reminded how life is in the rest of the world, remember just how blessed you really are!

Reach out and Love Someone!

Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago. Top, Alinari/Art Resource; Associated Press HARMONY OF THE UNIVERSE Einstein, who learned to play the violin as a child and often turned to music in difficult times, was especially fond of the sonatas by Mozart. There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think.

Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's "was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master." Einstein believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres  which, he wrote, revealed a "pre-established harmony" exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.

Thus it was less laborious calculation, but "pure thought" to which Einstein attributed his theories.

Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between their creative processes, as well as their histories.

As a boy Einstein did poorly in school. Music was an outlet for his emotions. At 5, he began violin lessons but soon found the drills so trying that he threw a chair at his teacher, who ran out of the house in tears. At 13, he discovered Mozart's sonatas.

The result was an almost mystical connection, said Hans Byland, a friend of Einstein's from high school. "When his violin began to sing," Mr. Byland told the biographer Carl Seelig, "the walls of the room seemed to recede  for the first time, Mozart in all his purity appeared before me, bathed in Hellenic beauty with its pure lines, roguishly playful, mightily sublime."

From 1902 to 1909, Einstein was working six days a week at a Swiss patent office and doing physics research  his "mischief"  in his spare time. But he was also nourished by music, particularly Mozart. It was at the core of his creative life.

And just as Mozart's antics shocked his contemporaries, Einstein pursued a notably Bohemian life in his youth. His studied indifference to dress and mane of dark hair, along with his love of music and philosophy, made him seem more poet than scientist.

He played the violin with passion and often performed at musical evenings. He enchanted audiences, particularly women, one of whom gushed that "he had the kind of male beauty that could cause havoc."

He also empathized with Mozart's ability to continue to compose magnificent music even in very difficult and impoverished conditions. In 1905, the year he discovered relativity, Einstein was living in a cramped apartment and dealing with a difficult marriage and money troubles.

That spring he wrote four papers that were destined to change the course of science and nations. His ideas on space and time grew in part from aesthetic discontent. It seemed to him that asymmetries in physics concealed essential beauties of nature; existing theories lacked the "architecture" and "inner unity" he found in the music of Bach and Mozart.

In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.

"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music," recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve all his difficulties."

In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe.

Scientists often describe general relativity as the most beautiful theory ever formulated. Einstein himself always emphasized the theory's beauty. "Hardly anyone who has truly understood it will be able to escape the charm of this theory," he once said.

The theory is essentially one man's view of how the universe ought to be. And amazingly, the universe turned out to be pretty much as Einstein imagined. Its daunting mathematics revealed spectacular and unexpected phenomena like black holes.

Though a Classical giant, Mozart helped lay groundwork for the Romantic with its less precise structures. Similarly, Einstein's theories of relativity completed the era of classical physics and paved the way for atomic physics and its ambiguities. Like Mozart's music, Einstein's work is a turning point.

At a 1979 concert for the centenary of Einstein's birth, the Juilliard Quartet recalled having played for Einstein at his home in Princeton, N.J. They had taken quartets by Beethoven and Bartok and two Mozart quintets, said the first violinist, Robert Mann, whose remarks were recorded by the scholar Harry Woolf.

After playing the Bartok, Mann turned to Einstein. "It would give us great joy," he said, "to make music with you." Einstein in 1952 no longer had a violin, but the musicians had taken an extra. Einstein chose Mozart's brooding Quintet in G minor.

"Dr. Einstein hardly referred to the notes on the musical score," Mr. Mann recalled, adding, "while his out-of-practice hands were fragile, his coordination, sense of pitch, and concentration were awesome."

He seemed to pluck Mozart's melodies out of the air.

Arthur I. Miller, professor of the history and philosophy of science at University College London, wrote "Empire of the Stars."

"In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature." - Carl Sagan

"Art is the signature of civilizations." - Beverly Sills

"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others." - Albert Camus

"Have no fear of perfection -- you'll never reach it." - Salvador Dali

"There is no such [thing] as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing." - Edgar Degas

"The artist has one function--to affirm and glorify life." - W. Edward Brown

"The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." - Pablo Picasso

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures." - Henry Ward Beecher

"The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone" - Michelangelo Buonarroti

"The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist." - Novalis

"In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world." - John W. Gardner

"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness." - Max Eastman

"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman." - Emile Zola

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work." - Emile Zola

"Painting in watercolor is like walking a tight-rope; one must achieve a perfect balance between what the paint wants to do and what the artist wants to do, or all is lost." - Mary C. Taylor

"Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed to be a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires." - Pablo Picasso

"Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo flying across in front of a beautiful sunset. And he has a beautiful rose in his beak. And also he is carrying a very beautiful painting in his feet. And also, you're drunk." - Jack Handey

"Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it." - Edgar Degas

"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 Bradstreet

"I have been to the end of the earth, I have been to the end of the waters, I have been to the end of the sky, I have been to the end of the mountains, I have found none that are not my friends." - American Indian Proverb

"Reason is intelligence exercising itself; Creativity is intelligence with an erection." - Victor Hugo

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams

"Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar." - Nnamdi Azikiwe

"Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work." - Rita Mae Brown

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." - Joseph Chilton Pearce

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better." - John Updike

"I will master something, then the creativity will come." - Japanese Proverb