Paint Quotes & Sayings

Our guys took Shop and Advanced Shop. Shop is when you make a chair. Advanced Shop is when you paint it. — Al McGuire

If I'm interrupted, it's just a minor inconvenience, but not a disaster, because it's easy to get back where I was: that is, the paint has not changed consistency; the light has not moved. — Buffy Sainte-Marie

An artist is a prophet and seer, not a paint craftsman or design maker, or reporter or entertainer ... the artist has the superiorly searching perception with which that world outside of man's contamination can be penetrated and the truth drawn out from it. — Morris Graves

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Oh, for eloquence to plead the cause of China, for a pencil dipped in fire to paint the condition of this people. — Hudson Taylor

Life is a Canvas. Every action of ours is a stroke of paint and at the end, how beautiful our painting is will depend upon all our strokes, all our Actions. -RVM — R.v.m.

I have to paint fast on television because of the limited time, but I don't want people to see what I'm showing them as work, something to worry and fret over. This is supposed to be fun. — Bob Ross

So now you know why I think all talk of borders and colors and nationalities is absurd. People try to pin you down on a map and paint you a certain color to make everything simple. But the world is far from simple, and intelligent human beings don't like to be pinned down and painted by some hand in the sky, whether it belongs to a god, a priest, or a politician. — Anne Fortier

There is a bus station in Henry, but it isn't on Main Street. It's one block north - the town fathers hadn't wanted all the additional traffic. The station lost one-third of its roof to a tornado fifteen years ago. In the same summer, a bottle rocket brought the gift of fire to its restrooms. The damage has never been repaired, but the town council makes sure that the building is painted fresh every other year, and always the color of a swimming pool. There is never graffiti. Vandals would have to drive more than twenty miles to buy the spray paint.

Every once in a long while, a bus creeps into town and eases to a stop beside the mostly roofed, bright aqua station with the charred bathrooms. Henry is always glad to see a bus. Such treats are rare. — N.D. Wilson

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really. — Balthus

If I had my child to raise all over again,
I'd build self-esteem first, and the house later.
I'd finger-paint more, and point the finger less.
I would do less correcting and more connecting.
I'd take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes.
I'd take more hikes and fly more kites.
I'd stop playing serious, and seriously play.
I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars.
I'd do more hugging and less tugging. — Diane Loomans

People don't care how you feel. You need to paint pictures, you need to tell stories. That's what people want. They want to be entertained. Then all of the other stuff kind of filters across as part of the whole thing. — Glenn Frey

The first time you view a house, you see how pretty the paint is and buy it. The second time you look to see if the basement has termites. It's the same with men. — Claudia Carroll

There is no condition that you cannot modify into something more, any more than there is any painting that you can paint and not like and just paint over it again. There are many limiting thoughts in the human environment that make it feel like it is not so, as you have these incurable illnesses, or these unchangeable conditions. But we say, they are only "unchangeable" because you believe that they are. — Esther Hicks

Oh, I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints ... — Joni Mitchell

Our group pressed west on what was left of Highway 93, toward the pass leading to Las Vegas. Sand covered the road in loose drifts so deep the horses' hooves sank into them. The metal highway signs were bent low by the strong wind, and above us, billboards that once screamed ads for the casinos were now stripped of their promises of penny slots and large jackpots. The raw boards underneath were exposed, like showgirls without their makeup. Some signs had been blown over completely and lay half-buried under mounds of sand, like sleeping animals.
Cars dotted the highway, their paint scoured off and dead tumbleweeds caught underneath them. Their windows were fogged with death, and despite my effort not to look, my eyes were drawn to the blurred images of the still forms inside. I tried to concentrate on the dark road ahead of us instead. — Kirby Howell

If you paint the world in black and white you lose its colour. — Neel Burton

It does take a long time and a lot of paint to become our own artist. — Kate Jackson

The thoughts we choose to think are the tools we use to paint the canvas of our lives. — Louise Hay

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. — Robert M. Pirsig

When you make music, you're forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker. — Flea

When a seed sprouts, it's a violent process. The skin breaks and splits in two. Something dies and something is born. Anytime you paint a strong or violent image, you may be expressing that part of yourself that's opening in order to let the new emerge. — Michele Cassou

It's as if a child with a brush and too much enthusiasm has been set free with a tin of black paint inside me. — Jenny Downham

Let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she will come. — William Shakespeare

At the center of any tree is the great pillar of the central trunk ... It's like building a cathedral by applying paint every week and waiting for it to dry before applying the next paint-thin layer of living material. Each angelic layer is applied, in times of drought and times of moisture alike. The tree simply keeps growing, higher and higher, expanding its territory, pushing out new growth. — Ned Hayes

Paint the entire ship? Id rather eat my cigar! — Hannibal

The water color process takes me and itself to a destination I hadn't even known existed ... Whatever I put down on the page, the paint will dry as it wants to. — Joseph Raffael

Calum offered to paint my nails but I said no because he always uses the wrong shade of purple. — Luke Hemmings

She was an ordinary librarian, innocent of any crime, but one day she fell into a giant paint box and has been on the run from the fashion police ever since ... — Helen Oyeyemi

Time is a blank paper we paint with our best colors; is a gift to feel well and exercising happiness. — Markus Thayer

Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that,or was I just too concerned that you weren't going to earn a living? I know the answer ... I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone's carpet, rather than realizing that you'd made color itself tactile. — Rosamund Lupton

He smiled against my cheek and kissed me again. "Talking with you would be much more enjoyable than talking with Talia, Lilly." His eyes scanned the floor by my feet. "She's paint by number; you're watercolor." Things like that, moments like those, how do you explain to other people that no one else in the world can make you feel this way? — Amber L. Johnson

If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees. — Robert Motherwell

I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly. — Robert Rauschenberg

She was a horse lover and she and Whitey kept a mean old paint, a fancy quarter horse/Arabian mix, a roan Appaloosa with one ghost eye named Spook, and a pony. So along with the whiskey and perfume and smoke, she often exuded faint undertones of hay, dust, and the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse. — Louise Erdrich

Kids are real artists. They'd rather paint the outside of the box than being stuck inside. — Shawn Lukas

After a thousand watercolors you will find you have fallen in love with paper and paint. — Rex Brandt

I'd tell everyone to come in naked in full body paint. — Bat For Lashes

Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. — Nicole Krauss

The good people of Dakota offered to give Calvin Coolidge a farm if he would live on it. I wouldn't advise you to give those people too much credit for generosity. There is not a farmer in any State in the West that wouldn't be glad to give him a farm if he will paint it, fix up the fences and keep up the series of mortgages that are on it. And if you think Coolidge ain't smart, you just watch him not take it. — Will Rogers

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough. — Toni Morrison

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them. — David Hockney

But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?" Maximilien asked.
"Because, my friend, I judge it by the past. — Alexandre Dumas

The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man's hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they — Gene Wolfe

My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print! — Mark Haddon

What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

You put your soul into those paintings, and nothing in this world is more beautiful to me than that soul of yours. — R.K. Lilley

Painters should shut up and paint and when we stop painting we should dance or have sex or get a massage or take a shower and we shouldn't be talking about painting. — Chris Martin

Jesus, you get sentimental when you're high on paint fumes. — Lisa Kleypas

It's more impressive," I said out loud. "From a distance, I mean. You can't see the wear on things, you know? You can't see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it. — John Green

The painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he conceives himself as a reflection of the objects he has put into his pictures and he lives in the reflections of his pictures, a writer, a serious writer, conceives himself as existing by and in himself, he does not at all live in the reflection of his books, to write he must first of all exist in himself, but for a painter to be able to paint, the painting must first of all be done. — Gertrude Stein

My willingness to explore and work freely is not without risk, and at times, I find myself caught in a bind ... Knowing I can fix whatever goes wrong allows me to paint, not without thought, but without hesitation. — Brian Johnson

I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist's palette capture the full range of what you mean to me? — Nicholas Sparks

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint. — Adolph Gottlieb

I think a lot guys get laid pretending to be Shaggy 2 Dope because without his paint he's a lot more unrecognizable. He's not a gimpy gorilla like me. — Joseph Bruce

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

Freeform radio is an art form. The airwaves are the empty canvas, the producer is the artist, and the sound is the paint. — Julius Lester

Right. I am here because I want to spend whatever time I can around Genevieve Windham, even if it's only a few weeks amid paint fumes and under her parents' watchful eyes. I am here to share with her whatever support and insight I might render regarding her art before she leaves for damned France. I am here" - he brushed his nose along the top of the cat's head - "because I could not resist the opportunity to see her, to kiss her, even once more." The cat appeared to consider this, then bopped Elijah's chin. "I am here because I am a fool." A — Grace Burrowes

I like druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains. I like their lack of training, their primitive technique. I think it hurts you, when you stay too long in school. — Lou Reed

If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is. — Bob Ross

I turned in his arms, blindly, gladly. God. All I'd ever wanted was someone to keep me. To want me, even knowing my faults. Like everything I'd ever sought out myself, with peeling paint and uneven edges and a tendency to fall apart. All I'd ever wanted was to be loved. I — Skye Warren

Since the rise of Islam, Jews had lived as a tolerated minority, or dhimmi, a status granted to Jews and Christians because they were monotheists. Despite a growing tendency in our own times to paint the premodern Islamic world as an Eden of religious tolerance in which Jews flourished, they always lived by the whims of fickle rulers and the mood of a hostile majority. In the eyes of that majority they were effete, lacking in honor, and powerless by definition, but as long as they accepted the supremacy of Muslims they were usually allowed to live and observe their faith and occasionally to prosper. — Matti Friedman

Ehlena was naturally lovely, with fine small features and that strawberry blond hair and those long, lean limbs.
Her lips were pink because they were pink - not from some eighteen-hour, glossy, frosted grease coat.
And her toffee-colored eyes were luminescent because they were yellow and red and gold all mixed together - not from a whole lot of paint-by-numbers shimmery shadow and slathered-on mascara.
And her cheeks were flushed because he was getting under her skin.

-Rehv's thoughts — J.R. Ward

They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought. — William Golding

They [Chinese] have very smart, experienced people. I don't want to paint them all with the same brush. There was a little bit of a feeling that the stock market, which went from something like $4 trillion in valuation to $10 trillion, that the Chinese wanted that. — Jamie Dimon

You can stick with a few clear-cut values, which are stronger than a multitude of values and will obviously yield a stronger painting. But not all subjects or light conditions appear that way ... be sensible and paint with values that are appropriate and faithful to your subject. — Richard Schmid

My sin as a painter is that I just want to paint anything I want to paint - and repaint. — Wayne Thiebaud

I've always loved black, and I realized that, from the beginning, man went into completely dark caves to paint. They painted with black too. They could have painted with white because there were white stones all over the ground, but no, they chose to paint with black in the dark. — Pierre Soulages

In the center was a tiny handprint in red paint. — J.R. Ward

I hope I will be able to paint as long as I live. — Margrethe II Of Denmark

How could anyone not want to live when there were so many things to live for? There were rainy nights and wind and the slap of the sea and the moon. There were books to read and pictures to paint and music. — Michelle Magorian

Every good painter paints what he is. — Jackson Pollock

I just can't seem to paint nice things. — Ivan Albright

Science has proved that everything is energy, and now they have dark energy, dark matter. They don't call it all-embracing consciousness; they call it dark because they can't measure it. You know, paint it black. — Dave Davies

I can always paint very well with my eyes, but with my hands it doesn't always work out. — Kathe Kollwitz

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it. — Keegan-Michael Key

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else. — Henri Matisse

I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening ... like a light in the midst of the darkness. — Vincent Van Gogh

Great! I hope different police officers are here this time."
"Might be, but we're in the same police jurisdiction. I'm certain from the last time you were here, they probably have a record about you. What was it you said? You were playing some game re-enactment the last time you were injured?"
"Yes. How did your brother come up the idea of a paint-ball game? That's a good one."
"He's played them here before. He would like to bring the game back to our world, but we fight for real. — Terry Spear

Wordy! I enjoy description - I like words, and words are the tools that writers use, just like paint is the tool that artists use. I think words are fun, and I have a lot of fun using them. I know that a lot of kids think my stories start very slowly, and I expect that's true. But that's the way I like to read stories, so when I'm writing them I can do what I want! I say that to kids in schools, and they are very generous - they say, That's true. You can do what you want. It's your story. — Natalie Babbitt

I don't know why I feel so tremendously ashamed of myself for leaving them. Why it feels so selfish and horrible to paint. I shouldn't
shouldn't feel that way, should I? I know I shouldn't, but I can't help it."
The rose hung limply from my fingers. "All those years, what I did for them ... And they didn't try to stop you from taking me. — Sarah J. Maas

Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. — William Shakespeare

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances. — Seth Godin

Sometimes I wish that I could sing or dance or paint or compose symphonies or build cathedrals to express somehow what all of this means to me. I wish I were a priest or a robin or a child or a sunset. — Robert Benson

It is the work of the Canadian artist to paint or play or write in such a way that life will be enlarged for himself and his fellow man. The painter will look around him ... and finding everything good, will strive to communicate that feeling through a portrayal of the essentials of sunlight, or snow, or tree or tragic cloud, or human face, according to his power and individuality. — J. E. H. MacDonald

Please - please just do this for me," Tamlin said, stroking his stallion's thick neck as the beast nickered with impatience. The others had already moved their horses into easy canters, the first of them nearly within the shade of the woods. Tamlin jerked his chin toward the alabaster estate looming behind me. "I'm sure there are things to help with around the house. Or you could paint. Try out that new set I gave for you for Winter Solstice. — Sarah J. Maas

Sometimes I just want to sit and write at a clean table and not get paint all over my hands. — Danny Fox

For we are all amateurs at life, but if we do not focus too much on our mistakes, a miraculous picture emerges. And we learn that it's not the beauty of the image that warrants our gratitude
it's the chance to paint. — Richard Paul Evans

You cannot paint the exterior of your house. You have to take the paint chip down to show the paint-chip Nazis. — Dave Barry

True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state. — John W. Davis

In terms of the pilot, you have to introduce a lot of characters in a very short period of time, and you have to paint with slightly broad brush strokes because you just need to give an audience an idea of who these people might be. — Jack Davenport

Why do writers write? Why do actors act? Why do painters paint? It doesn't pay much, unless you're very successful. It's who we are. — Lori Lesko

You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form. — John Fowles

A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself
all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul. — George Santayana

Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic - work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don't let the lies fence you in or hold you back. — Sarah Bessey

And the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time — Frank O'Hara

He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters. — William Gibson

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow. — Anselm Kiefer

For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade. — William Butler Yeats

If England was what England seems, And not the England of our dreams; But only putty, brass, and paint, 'Ow we'd chuck 'er- but she ain't! — Rudyard Kipling