Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.

When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like ‚Bird,‘ I use 90% black people.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

There is no education like adversity.

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.

Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

There’s definitely going to be things that I’m not very good at, things I can improve.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

You know, nothing is more important than education, because nowhere are our stakes higher; our future depends on the quality of education of our children today.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‚What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?‘ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.

I practiced drawing all the time and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn’t getting anywhere – like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department – I would draw the other people.

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Life is short, the art long.

I don’t have stylistic loyalty. That’s why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

Some people, they take their form of working out as a religion that they think is better than everyone else’s. I’m not like that. If you have a better way to work out, and you can teach it to me, and I find it to be useful and gets me in better shape, I’m all about.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.