Alain de Botton Quotes

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.

The big artist keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

At the heart of art is learning to see

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

Art is born in attention.

The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.

I have always liked drawing, when you draw you see things more intensely.

Art is about paying attention.

The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

When I’m photographing I see life.

There is creation in the eye.

No one comes from the earth like grass. We come like trees. We all have roots.

Art demands constant observation.

The observation of nature is part of an artist's life.