If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

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.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

People will forgive anything but beauty and talent. So I am doubly unpardonable.

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!

Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress.