Quotes by Painters - Page 5

In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving towards me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I'm not afraid.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Only if we transvalue the plain-vanilla standards of our life, we may bring back things to light and sense the lies behind perceptions. ("Behind the frosted glass")
Erik Pevernagie
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Pablo Picasso
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves and unless one travels to completely new territories one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
Jean Dubuffet
What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
Henry Miller
We have scholars galore, and kings and emperors, and statesmen and military leaders, and artists in profusion, and inventors, discoverers, explorers - but where are the great lovers? After a moment's reflection one is back to Abelard and Heloise, or Anthony and Cleopatra, or the story of the Taj Mahal. So much of it is fictive, expanded and glorified by the poverty-stricken lovers whose prayers are answered only by myth and legend.
Henry Miller
Being caught up in a game without having a clue about the rules, may be extremely maddening and frustrating. Liberty may be so frightening and grueling, that many don’t conceal their passion for rules and regulations, since these can give a relieving feeling of security and protection. ("When forgetting the rules of the game" )
Erik Pevernagie
If one considered life as a simple loan one would perhaps be less exacting.
Eugène Delacroix
Since we live in a world of appearances, people are judged by what they seem to be. If the mind can't read the predictable features, it reacts with alarm or aversion. Faces which don’t fit in the picture are socially banned. An ugly countenance, a hideous outlook can be considered as a crime and criminals must be inexorably discarded from society. ( "Ugly mug offense" )
Erik Pevernagie
Ah, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. Joy is the anticipation of joy.
Rabih Alameddine
Faith in oneself... is the best and safest course.
Michelangelo
In the closed world of the gynaeceum, despite the gardens and parkland extending beyong the horizon, despite the insurmountable walls separating pavillions and palaces, the tangled web of our fate was inescapable. Why did these women love each other to the point of madness? Why did they loathe one another so vehemently, and why did sworn enemies feel such horror and fascination for one another? Why should furious hate become obsession, then intoxication and the very reason to live?Because love and hate were the two heads of the demon.
Shan Sa
Liberty is only possible on the condition of regularity. We cannot be free and play the game of life without abiding to the rules, but the rules have to be adapted constantly in line with our experiences and the events we encounter. ( “If he doesn't play ball “ )
Erik Pevernagie
For every thing that lives is Holy.
William Blake
One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
Vincent van Gogh
I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
Andrew Wyeth
But to go to school in a summer morn,O! It drives all joy away;Under a cruel eye outworn,The little ones spend the dayIn sighing and dismay.
William Blake
The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
Henry Miller
One thought fills immensity.
William Blake
The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
William Hazlitt
If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.
Rabih Alameddine
Color is only beautiful when it means something.
Robert Henri
I was angry with my friend:I told my wrath, my wrath did end.I was angry with my foe:I told it not, my wrath did grow.
William Blake
And now you are and I am and we're a mystery which will never happen again.
E.E. Cummings
to be nobody but yourself- in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
E.E. Cummings
Happiness is something you lay siege to, it is a battle like a game of go. I will take hold of all the pain and snuff it out.
Shan Sa
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.
Leonora Carrington
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
Henry Miller
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John Berger
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty hesitation or incongruity.
William Hazlitt
We have no need for genius - genius is dead. We have need for strong hands, for spirits who are willing to give up the ghost and put on flesh...
Henry Miller
The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.
Pablo Picasso
Where friendship blooms, life is reborn.
Vincent van Gogh
I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.
Rabih Alameddine
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
John Berger
Emotional predictive profiling may help identify contingent fissures in the stature of endangered relationships. Still and all, it might be wise to let the genie out of problematic bottles in the first place, in advance of scouting the causes of surreptitious subliminal convulsions. ("Beware of the neighbor")
Erik Pevernagie
Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog until I pointed out that it was really a typewriter.
Pablo Picasso
The truly proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion and does not seek to make converts to it.
William Hazlitt
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
Paul Gauguin
Everything that lives lives not alone nor for itself.
William Blake
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch
When words have vanished, when daily habits have extinguished emotional exchange, only killing silence remains and indifference takes over. ( "Words had disappeared" )
Erik Pevernagie
Concentrate on a single feature – as, build all toward one eye – make all lines lead toward that eye. (Robert Henri)
Robert Henri
Recognizing a problem may help us to understand and solve a problem. Rather than lying down and selling our sound judgment short, let us appeal to the opulent granary of our memory and explore the green pastures lingering in our mind. ("Prêt-à-penser")
Erik Pevernagie
wash the brush, just beats the devil out of it
Bob Ross
But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.
Dorothy Dunnett
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books." (p. 5)
Rabih Alameddine
I saw an angel in the block of marble and I just chiseled until I set him free.
Michelangelo
The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.
Robert Henri
They never opened the door which leads to the soul.
Henry Miller
A man who does not like power will suffer from its cruelty.
Shan Sa
If we are cultivating fruit in an orchard, we wish that particular fruit to grow in its own way; we give it the soil it needs, the amount of moisture, the amount of care, but we do not treat the apple tree as we would the pear tree or the peach tree as we would the vineyard on the hillside. Each is allowed the freedom of its own kind and the result is the perfection of growth which can be accomplished in no other way. The time must come when the same freedom is allowed the individual; each in his own way must develop according to nature's purpose, the body must be but the channel for the expression of purpose, interest, emotion, labor. Everywhere freedom must be the sign of reason.
Robert Henri
mr youse needn't be so spryconcernin questions artyeach has his tastes but as for ii likes a certain partygimme the he-man's solid blissfor youse ideas i'll match yousea pretty girl who naked isis worth a million statues
E.E. Cummings
Dad? Dad, no. No. I can't. I can't. Why are you saying these things?""Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist
Fernand Léger
Art upsets science reassures.
Georges Braque
Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an "end" is intolerable to me.
Henry Miller