Great artists have no country.

The way of an artist is an entirely different way. It is a way of surrender.

Les grands artistes n'ont pas de patrie.

Great artists have no country.

Our great artists battle on a landscape we cannot chart, with weapons we do not comprehend, against adversaries we find unreal.

And he sets his mind to unknown arts

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

The artist works by locating the world in himself

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

The
Difference
Between a good artist
And a great one

Is:

The novice
Will often lay down his tool
Or brush

Then pick up an invisible club
On the mind’s table

And helplessly smash the easels and
Jade.

Whereas the vintage man
No longer hurts himself or anyone

And keeps on
Sculpting
Light.

Bei gleicher Umgebung lebt doch jeder in einer anderen Welt.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

If we make one criterion for defining the artist the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way - a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good - then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.