“The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination, will be the greatest!”
Quoted in: Giles Auty (1977) The Art of Self-Deception: An Intelligible Guide, p. 88
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir 44
French painter and sculptor 1841–1919Related quotes

Skinny Legs and All (1990)
Context: ... she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists."
“Among the swans there is none called the least,
or the greatest.”
"Evidence"
Evidence (2009)
from Baziote's text for a symposium in 1954; as quoted in William Baziotes – paintings and drawings, ed. Michael Preble, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2004, p. 18
1950s

Inarticulate Touches
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

“What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.”
Ce qu'on appelle la postérité, c'est la postérité de l'œuvre.
Source: In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919), Ch. I: "Madame Swann at Home"

RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911