Top 35 James Whistler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.”

— James Whistler

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2. “An artist’s career always begins tomorrow.”

— James Whistler

3. “Art is a goddess of dainty thought, reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal selfishly occupied with her own perfection only – having no desire to teach.”

— James Whistler

4. “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.”

— James Whistler

5. “Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.”

— James Whistler

6. “If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general.”

— James Whistler

7. “For art and joy go together, with bold openness, and high head, and ready hand – fearing naught and dreading no exposure.”

— James Whistler

8. “I always ask at once, ‘Do you drink?’ and if she says ‘No,’ I bow politely and say I am sorry but I fear she will not suit. All good cooks drink.”

— James Whistler

9. “Industry in art is a necessity – not a virtue – and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.”

— James Whistler

10. “Nature is usually wrong.”

— James Whistler

11. “A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.”

— James Whistler

12. “Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.”

— James Whistler

13. “The work of a master reeks not of the sweat of the brow – suggests no effort – and is finished from its beginning.”

— James Whistler

14. “I am not arguing with you – I am telling you.”

— James Whistler

15. “If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.”

— James Whistler

16. “The world is divided into two classes – invalids and nurses.”

— James Whistler

17. “People will forgive anything but beauty and talent. So I am doubly unpardonable.”

— James Whistler

18. “Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong...”

— James Whistler

19. “To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.”

— James Whistler

20. “It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.”

— James Whistler

21. “Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a breath on the surface of a pane of glass.”

— James Whistler

22. “The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother.”

— James Whistler

23. “Work alone will efface the footsteps of work.”

— James Whistler

24. “I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.”

— James Whistler

25. “The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many.”

— James Whistler

26. “We look at a painting to know the painter; it’s his company we are after, not his skill.”

— James Whistler

27. “If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.”

— James Whistler

28. “Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation.”

— James Whistler

29. “Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress.”

— James Whistler

30. “The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.”

— James Whistler

31. “You shouldn’t say it is not good. You should say, you do not like it; and then, you know, you’re perfectly safe.”

— James Whistler

32. “I remember that at one time I always made a drawing before going to bed!! – Of myself I mean – though I finally destroyed most of them.”

— James Whistler

33. “Can’t a person be born where they want to be born?”

— James Whistler

34. “To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.”

— James Whistler

35. “I can’t tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.”

— James Whistler