Elie Wiesel Quotes

I grew up wanting to be a painter and paint pictures.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.

You see, my ambition was not to confound the engineering world but simply to create a beautiful piece of art.

I thought maybe I could become like the next Van Gogh. I bought a sunflower and painted it, and it looked like the work of a 6-year-old.

One of my first dreams when I was a child was becoming a painter.

Sometimes when I walk into a gallery and I see someone's work, I think to myself, 'Gee, I wish I had done that.'

Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I've done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.

I will be a historical painter.

When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.

When I heard that there were artists, I wished I could some time be one. If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be happy! Or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me that I should be willing to spend years in trying.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

And I have exposed myself to art so that my work has something beyond just the usual potter.

I would have loved to have been a painter or a sculptor. I'm still fascinated by those things.

I originally just wanted to be an artist.

I think my original ambition was to be an artist.

As regards the efficacy of the art and the theories of it, I promise and expect that in these volumes I shall undoubtedly show myself of very considerable importance not only to builders but also to all scholars.

I do have a dream, a tableau of the bathing place of La Grenouillère, for which I've done some bad pochades (sketches), but it is a dream. Renoir, who have just spent a couple of months here, also wants to paint this subject.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

I really want to make art. I want to create something that's going to have a lasting impact.

Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.

No. Not yet. A craftsman only. But I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very very lucky, I will make a weapon that is a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer.

My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater. That always sounds so funny to people, comparing yourself to someone in the past that has done so much, and in your life you’re not even allowed to think that you can do as much. That’s a mentality that suppresses humanity.

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.