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.

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!

Can't a person be born where they want to be born?

Nature is usually wrong.

Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation.

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

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.