A Quote by Anton Chekhov

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

Anton Chekhov

Quote Topics

Artist

Quote Author

Anton Chekhov
Russian - Dramatist
January 29, 1860 - July 15, 1904

The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills.

Arthur Koestler

... yet there is a difference between scientific and artistic observation. The scientist observes to turn away and generalize; the artist observes to seize and use reality in all its individuality and peculiarity.

Edmund Blair Bolles

When the artist observes nature... it is as if nature communicated, through the sensitivity of the artist at that moment, one of its secrets.

Bruno Munari

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.

Max Ernst

A fool is a person who guesses and gets it wrong, a clever man is one who guesses, regardless of time period, and gets it right.

Voltaire

These are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

T. S. Eliot

Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must almost of necessity be many times as numerous as those which prove well founded.

William Stanley Jevons

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

Thomas Harris

Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.

Assata Shakur

Everyone who observes himself doubting observes a truth, and about that which he observes he is certain; therefore he is certain about a truth. Everyone therefore who doubts whether truth exists has in himself a truth on which not to doubt.... Hence one who can doubt at all ought not to doubt the existence of truth.

Saint Augustine

Immunologists agreed that an individual vertebrate synthesizes many millions of structurally different forms of antibody molecules even before it encounters an antigen.

Susumu Tonegawa

Painting, like poetry, selects in the universe whatever she deems most appropriate to her ends. She assembles in a single fantastic personage, circumstances and features which nature distributes among many individuals. From this combination, ingeniously composed, results that happy imitation by virtue of which the artist earns the title of inventor and not of servile copyist.

Francisco Goya

I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.