„One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.“

„You are always related [as an artist] to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric painting. I think the obvious comparison with my work would be Vasarely, and I can't think of anything I like less.... the 'Groupe de recherché d'Art visuel' actually painted all the patterns before I did – all the basic designs that are in my painting – I didn't even know about it.... it still doesn't have anything to do with my painting. I find all that European geometric painting – sort of post Ma Bill school – a kind of curiosity, very dreary.“

—  Frank Stella American artist 1936

Источник: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, p. 117

„My god, Sage. Your eyes. How have I never noticed them? When you stand in the light. They're amazing… like molten gold. I could paint those… They're beautiful. You're beautiful.“

—  Richelle Mead, Bloodlines

Источник: Bloodlines

„We believe that we can find the end, and that a painting can be finished. The Abstract Expressionists always felt the painting's being finished was very problematical. We'd more readily say that our paintings were finished and say, well, it's either a failure or it's not, instead of saying, well, maybe it's not really finished.“

—  Frank Stella American artist 1936

Quote from an interview, 1966; as quoted in Minimal Art, a Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, University of California Press, Berkeley 1968, p. 157-161
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

„There is only one kind of painting: landscape. It is the most difficult. It has also, I believe, the most simple kind of composition. Because no one can stop us from imagining the world in the way that pleases us most.“

—  André Derain French painter and engraver 1880 - 1954

Quote from Derain's letter to Maurice de Vlaminck, c. 1906; as cited in 'Report: André Derain's 'Trees by a Lake', by Cleo Nisse and Francesca Whitlum-Cooper http://courtauld.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Report-Derain-by-F-Whitlum-Cooper-and-Cleo-Nisse.compressed.pdf, p. 5

„To achieve the structure it takes a damn long time, so my paintings are always in work for a very long time—sometimes a year. Not that I work on them every day. I will have them, and then come back to them after a year, and also return intermittently. It’s not easily done. I am not able to do “one, two, a painting.” I try to do it very quickly, but it doesn’t work with me. I simply can’t do it. Very often people look and say, 'Ah, fantastic! That’s a beautiful painting.'“

—  Per Kirkeby Danish artist 1938 - 2018

But the moment they are out the door I start working on it. I rework it.
In a talk with Kosinski, before 'Per Kirkeby at the Phillips', in The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. January, 2013
Kirkeby spoke to exhibition co-curator Dorothy Kosinski about the necessity of time in the development of a painting.
1995 and later

„What, after all, is a pretty woman? It's a mere subjective impression – what you yourself think of her. That's what I paint, another kind of beauty of my own.“

—  André Derain French painter and engraver 1880 - 1954

Источник: The Wild Men of Paris', 1910, p. 406

„Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.“

—  John Ruskin English writer and art critic 1819 - 1900

„For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.“

—  Sam Levenson American journalist 1911 - 1980

„So one crazy analogy to how my morality might turn out to work, and the big point here is I don't know how my morality works, is we have a painting and the painting is very beautiful. There is some crap on the painting. Would I like the crap cleaned up? Yes, very much. That's like the suffering that's in the world today. Then there is making more of the painting, that's just a strange function. My utility with the size of the painting, it's just like a strange and complicated function. It may go up in any kind of reasonable term that I can actually foresee, but flatten out, at some point.“

—  Holden Karnofsky

In a conversation https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/01-16-2014-conversation-on-existential-risk.pdf with Luke Muehlhauser and Eliezer Yudkowsky, January 2014; part of this is quoted by Carl Shulman in "Population ethics and inaccessible populations" https://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2014/08/population-ethics-and-inaccessible.html
Контексте: So one crazy analogy to how my morality might turn out to work, and the big point here is I don't know how my morality works, is we have a painting and the painting is very beautiful. There is some crap on the painting. Would I like the crap cleaned up? Yes, very much. That's like the suffering that's in the world today. Then there is making more of the painting, that's just a strange function. My utility with the size of the painting, it's just like a strange and complicated function. It may go up in any kind of reasonable term that I can actually foresee, but flatten out, at some point. So to see the world as like a painting and my utility of it is that, I think that is somewhat of an analogy to how my morality may work, that it's not like there is this linear multiplier and the multiplier is one thing or another thing. It's: starting to talk about billions of future generations is just like going so far outside of where my morality has ever been stress-tested. I don't how it would respond. I actually suspect that it would flatten out the same way as with the painting.

„Landscapes are useful to a figure painter, too; out-of-doors one uses colours one would never think of in the weaker studio light. But landscape painting is a thankless job; you waste half a day for the sake of one hour's painting. You only finish one painting out of ten, because the weather keeps changing. You start work on a sunlight effect and it comes on to rain – or you had a few clouds in the sky, and the wind blows them away. It's always the same story!“

—  Pierre-Auguste Renoir French painter and sculptor 1841 - 1919

Источник: undated quotes, p. 196 : on painting landscape in open air, to art-buyer George Riviere.

„The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, "let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible."“

—  Clive Barker author, film director and visual artist 1952

I have lingered, of course.
American Heroes #174

„I have finished a fairly large painting, the goat; I sometimes spoke to you about my plan. I believe it has become a real painting, and very complete.“

—  Jan Mankes Dutch painter 1889 - 1920

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek

(original Dutch: citaat van Jan Mankes, in het Nederlands:) Ik heb een vrij groot schilderij af, de geit https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mankes_Jonge_witte_geit.jpg; over het plan daartoe sprak ik u wel eens. Het is dunkt me volkomen een schilderij geworden, en heel compleet.

Quote of Jan Mankes (1914) in a letter to A.A.M. Pauwels in The Hague; as cited by J.R. de Groot in 'De bekoring van het gewone - Het werk van Jan Mankes' https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_ons003199001_01/_ons003199001_01_0014.php, p. 104

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mankes_Jonge_witte_geit.jpg
1909 - 1914

„This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian.“

—  Wolfgang Pauli Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner 1900 - 1958

In a letter to George Gamow, 1958, commenting on Werner Heisenberg's claim to a journalist that Pauli and Heisenberg have found a unified field theory, "but the technical details were missing"; as quoted in Hyperspace : A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension (1995) by Michio Kaku, p. 137
Контексте: This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. [A big drawing of a rectangle] Only technical details are missing.

„It is in working [= painting] that you will find yourself..“

—  Albert Marquet French artist 1875 - 1947

Quotes by Marcelle Marquet; as cited in Exposition Marquet, Musee des Beaux Arts Nancy, Juin - July, 1959, p. 18 (transl. Norris Judd)

„I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.“

—  W.E.B. Du Bois American sociologist, historian, activist and writer 1868 - 1963

p. xi

„Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect.
Then be sure of one thing:
The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have.“

—  Richard Bach American spiritual writer 1936

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

„I painted like that because I wanted to get through to something new - a kind of painting that was my own.“

—  Georges Seurat French painter 1859 - 1891

quote from Seurat, John Russell; Thames & Hudson, London 1965 ISBN 0-500-20032-7
undated quotes

„I don't like that word 'finish'. When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.“

—  Arshile Gorky Armenian-American painter 1904 - 1948

quote of 1948
1942 - 1948
Источник: Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 32

„Today I painted my first plain air portrait at the clay pit, a little blond and blue-eyed girl. The way the little thing stood in the yellow sand was simply beautiful – a bright and shimmering thing to see. It made my heart leap. Painting people is indeed more beautiful than painting a landscape. I suppose you can notice that I am dead-tired, after this long day of hard work, cant you? But inside I am so peaceful and happy..“

—  Paula Modersohn-Becker German artist 1876 - 1907

in a letter to her mother, from Worpswede, August 1897; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals by Paula Modersohn-Becker, eds. Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey - Northwestern University Press, 1998, p. 79
1897