A student of James McNeill Whistler tells the great artist, 'I tend to paint what I see.' Whistler replies, 'Ah! The shock will come when you see what you paint!

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.

Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say, you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Art is a goddess of dainty thought, reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal selfishly occupied with her own perfection only - having no desire to teach.