A poor life is lived by any one who doesn't regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from what is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.

I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.

Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.