Painter

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

🇺🇸William Blake

Art

Romanticism

"Sing louder aroundTo the bells' cheerful sound,While our sports shall be seenOn the ecchoing green."

🇺🇸Kahlil Gibran

Literature

Symbolism

1922–2008

"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them."

🇩🇪Hermann Hesse

Literature

existentialism

1861–1948

"The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish — and it will."

Rabindranath Tagore

Music

Bengali Renaissance

1861–1941

"He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good."

🇬🇧Freddie Mercury

Music

1946–1991

"Listen, if you guys wanna move around and shift your asses a little, it's okay. It's okay by us, right? You can take all your clothes off if you like too, doesn't matter... Fuck off!"

🇺🇸Bob Ross

Art

1942–1995

"Little more black, little more blue. And we'll just put that in using little crisscross strokes or--or little X's, whatever you want to call them. Whatever."

🇺🇸George W. Bush

Politics

1824–1900

"President Obama's got plenty of critics, and I'm not going to be one."

Leonardo da Vinci

Mathematics

Renaissance

1452–1519

"Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie."

🇺🇸Bob Dylan

Music

b. 2000

"Yesterday's just a memory; tomorrow's never what it's supposed to be."

🇺🇦Nestor Makhno

Military

1888–1934

"Anarchism — a life of freedom and creative independence for humanity."

Vincent van Gogh

Art

Expressionism

1853–1890

"pdf - selected quotes of Vincent van Gogh, by the former director of the MoMA; Alfred H. Barr, 1935"

Ai Weiwei

Art

conceptual art

b. 1957

"I often think what I’m saying is for the people who never had a chance to be heard."

🇺🇸Willem de Kooning

Art

abstract expressionism

1904–1997

"For really, when you think of all the life and death problems in the art of the Renaissance, who cares if a Chevalier is laughing or that a young girl has a red blouse on."

🇫🇷Henri Matisse

Art

Impressionism

1869–1954

"I don't paint things. I only paint the differences between things."

🇨🇱Alejandro Jodorowsky

Religion

Surrealism

b. 1929

"That is the marvel of true art, that no one has yet found a way to commercialize it."

Samuel Butler (novelist)

Literature

1835–1902

"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."

John Ruskin

Art

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

1819–1900

"Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it."

🇺🇸William S. Burroughs

Literature

Beat Generation

1914–1997

"A ghost in daylight on a crowded street."

🇬🇧David Hockney

Art

pop art

1937–2026

"'Why David Hockney Should Not Be Taken Seriously'."

🇺🇸Walt Disney

Entertainment

1901–1966

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life."

"You become an artist to upset your family."

Paula Modersohn-Becker

Art

Expressionism

1876–1907

"I would like to go to Paris for a week. Fifty-six Cezannes are being shown there!"

🇺🇸Marsden Hartley

Art

Dada

1877–1943

"happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.. .. rendering the God-spirit in the mountains."

🇬🇧Beatrix Potter

Literature

1866–1943

"I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense..."

🇺🇸John Cage

Art

Fluxus

1912–1992

"Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens."

🇺🇸Franz Kline

Music

abstract expressionism

1910–1962

"People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,but this is not true.I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important."

🇮🇳Anish Kapoor

Art

contemporary art

b. 1954

"Jerusalem is all about a very special relationship between the ground and the sky. This work attempts to bring the two together."

🇫🇷Claude Monet

Art

Modernism

1840–1926

"I am working as hard as I possibly can, and do not even dream of doing anything except the cathedral. It is an immense task."

"The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money."

🇩🇪Max Ernst

Art

Surrealism

1891–1976

"The 2nd of April at 9:45 a.m. Max Ernst had his first contact with the sensible world, when he came out of the egg which his mother had laid in an eagle's nest and which the bird had brooded for seven years."

🇺🇸Jeff Koons

Art

Postmodernism

b. 1955

"I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I’m a messenger."

🇬🇧Paul McCartney

Music

b. 1942

"The Art of Paul McCartney - Exhibition 2002"

🇬🇧Banksy

Politics

contemporary art

b. 1973

"People who should be shot: Fascist thugs, religious fundamentalists, people who write lists telling you who should be shot."

🇺🇸Jim Carrey

Entertainment

b. 1962

"If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret."

"I was very lucky in my career and I loved it. But I don’t think I was accomplished enough as an actor to be remembered particularly. No, I’d like to be remembered as a decent human being, and a caring one."

🇬🇧Henry Holiday

Art

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

1839–1927

"Much fruitless speculation has been spent over supposed hidden meanings in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark. The inclination to search for these was strictly natural, though the search was destined to fail."

Marie Bilders-van Bosse

Art

1837–1900

"images of her painting art in the rijksmuseum, Amsterdam"

🇫🇷Théodore Rousseau

Art

Barbizon school

1812–1867

"biography-text of Th. Roussseau in 'Barbizon days : Millet - Corot - Rousseau - Barye', by Charles Sprague Smith, 1906"

🇫🇷Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Art

Impressionism

1841–1919

"Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard."