Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~ Scott Adams

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
~ Theodore Adorno

It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.
~ Samuel Butler

Nature is the Art of God.
~ Dante Alighieri in Monarchy

Art is a quest for the useless.
~ Gustave Flaubert

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
~ Rollo May

But then no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.
~ Irving Stone, in Lust for Life

Art is not pleasure, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art?

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