We have art so that we may not perish by the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

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

For me, painting is a way to forget life.  
Georges Rouault

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

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

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

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

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

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Cyril Connelly

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

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
Cyril Connolly

What quotes do you carry about with you, or pin up on your pinboard because they have moved your soul, inspired you, given you that joyous Aha, of "Yessss ... that's what it's about!"?