Ignacy Jan Paderewski Quotes

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man.

You have to give every portion of yourself to it. As an artist, that is just what you do - because we love it - we were born to do it.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.

Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength ... .

The person who practices an art is an artist, not a samurai, and one should have the intention of being called a samurai.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.

I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.

Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?

If it is the mark of the artist to love art before everything, to renounce everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great work - then I was never an artist.

To choose art means to turn one's back on the world, or at least on certain of its distractions.

I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

My art form is my child, and that's what I give my focus to.

An artist is born like a priest is born. If they are born an artist, I would tell them art is not a game: it is something very serious which completely requires everything you have to give.

To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

You stand your ground and you perform your art. That's what the artist does. The artist is about perfection.

An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.

A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.

It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.