The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. - Aristotle

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul - and you answer. - Star Richés

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. - Jean Cocteau

Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. - Leonard Bernstein, What Makes Opera Grand?

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild. - Dante Alighieri, Inferno

A portrait has one advantage over its original: it is unconscious; and you may therefore admire without insulting it. I have seen portraits which have more. - Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die. - Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, no. 8