Piet Mondrian Quotes

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.

One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.

I have been struggling with mental illness and emptiness throughout my life. Now I want people to understand my glorious quest for the truth. Working on paintings is a process toward my artistic creation. It is a new spiritual theme of my whole philosophy for pursuing the truth. Each painting represents a process in all of my art.

Normal people do not create art.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

Getting to share a project with Anthony Hopkins is incredible. It's like watching Da Vinci paint or something - you're reminded why you do what you do.

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences.

I know now that everybody in the arts is forever a beginner. Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Every night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.

As artists, we belong to an ancient and holy tribe. We are the carriers of the truth that spirit moves through us all. When we deal with one another, we are dealing not merely with our own human personalities but also with the unseen but ever-present throng of ideas, visions, stories, poems, songs, sculptures, art-as-facts that crowd the temple of consciousness waiting their turn to be born.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

It's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary...it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

Don't be too precious about your craft... there's only 26 letters and 12 notes, and Shakespeare and Beethoven said it all better than any of us ever will

The Arts are learnt by reason and method; they are mastered by practice.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

Formal art is essentially rational.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Producing perfection from imperfection is, after all, the highest of art forms.

Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.