Quotes by Painters - Page 8

The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half so bad if it isn't you.
Laurence Ferlinghetti
All at once I feel desperate, outraged. Why am I alone doomed to spend nights of torment, with an unseen jailer, when all the rest of the world sleeps peacefully? By what laws have I been tried and condemned, without my knowledge, and to such a heavy sentence, too, when I do not even know of what or by whom I have been indicted? A wild impulse comes to me to protest, to demand a hearing, to refuse to submit any longer to such injustice. But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one’s innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there’s no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.
Anna Kavan
To become a father is not hard to be a father is however.
Wilhelm Busch
Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.
Eugène Delacroix
Emotion often outwits intelligence, while intuition renders life surprisingly fluent and enjoyable. ("Le ciel c'est l'autre")
Erik Pevernagie
Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.
Henri Matisse
Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone,While pain and guilt still linger here below,Blindness and numbness--these please me alone;Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal
John Berger
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
William Blake
Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.
William Hazlitt
I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.
Henry Miller
The happiness of being envied is glamour.Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
John Berger
Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It’s an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don’t see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Art is a harmony parallel with nature
Paul Cézanne
We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.
Natalie Goldberg
Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.
William Hazlitt
Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
Jasper Johns
Think of your husband as a house. You are allowed to give him a fresh coat of paint and change out the furniture now and then. But if you're constantly trying to pour a new foundation or replace the roof, you're in serious trouble.
Peter Scott
To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Trifles make perfection - and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo
If bees die, people will die. Only ignorance never dies! ("Why step out of nature ?")
Erik Pevernagie
Once the dust of volcanic love has settled and the harshness of a new reality has become oppressive, disillusionment may have to be mended, wounds to be healed and emotional fallouts to be taken care of, mindfully ( "Is that all there is ?")
Erik Pevernagie
I guess everyone has a bird urge when they look down heights, a desire to jump, without wing or buoyant sail. Fear of heights is fear of a desire to jump.
Amruta Patil
Amateurs look for inspiration the rest of us just get up and go to work.
Chuck Close
It may be expedient to take stock of all the affecting pieces that might shatter in the wake of an emotional earthquake, once red flags come up in a committed relationship and an overarching scene has to be fashioned for a recast life experience. ("Waiting for the pieces to fall into place")
Erik Pevernagie
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
Pablo Picasso
I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit.
Henry Miller
He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
William Hazlitt
You must remain. I must depart.Two autumns falling in the heart.
Buson
What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?
Wyndham Lewis
I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.
Vincent van Gogh
There are worst things in life than kissing boys.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
While we are curling down in our comfort zone, the perverted talents of connectivity-designers drive us surreptitiously into a blind alley of addiction. If, however, we succeed in impeding mobiles' unlimited rule, we may be able to relish the fragrance of the ‘moment’ but also sense the vital spark and spirit of “otherness”. ("Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me")
Erik Pevernagie
You know what the worst thing about adults is? ...They're not always adults. But that's what I like about them.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo Buonarroti
I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensible for my dialogue with nature.
Caspar David Friedrich
When we are no longer children we are already dead
Constantin Brancusi
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
Claude Monet
I wanted to tell him not to cry anymore, tell him that what those boys did to that bird didn’t matter. But I knew it did matter. It mattered to Dante. And, anyway, it didn’t do any good to tell him not to cry because he needed to cry. That’s the way he was.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
There is safety in the very heart of danger.
Vincent van Gogh
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
John Berger
Let us use words carefully, because words can betray and kill.( "A gap of silence")
Erik Pevernagie
When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.
Henry Miller
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
Robert Henri
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Pablo Picasso
When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.
Max Ernst
I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.
Rabih Alameddine
He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals
Henry Miller
You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.
Rabih Alameddine
One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.
Vincent van Gogh
Stolen moments” create a feeling of enjoyment in our “intensive time” awareness. The glow and the intensity of those instants can guide us throughout a whole lifetime. They can expose a second or a third dimension of the daily events and shed an expounding light on all the little details we encounter. ("Stolen moments" )
Erik Pevernagie
I don't like the memories because the tears come easily, and once again I break my promise to myself for this day. It's a constant battle. a war between remembering and forgetting.
E.E. Cummings
I confess I do not know why, but looking at the stars always makes me dream.
Vincent van Gogh
A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.
Anna Kavan
But why was the room suddenly becoming so dark? It was the middle of the afternoon. With a supreme effort Giuseppe Corte, who felt himself paralyzed with a strange lethargy, looked at the clock on the nightstand beside the bed. It was 3:30. He turned his head in the other direction and saw that the shutters, in obedience to some mysterious command, were closing slowly, blocking the passage of light.
Dino Buzzati
One day it may feel as if energy and enthusiasm are quenched, feelings dried up and emotions scorched, love and affection tangled in a harsh and uninviting setting. Nothing seems to grow anymore. No seed. No flowers. No foreseeable hope. No conceivable prospects. Any blossom of expectation seems to have become an illusion and life appears to have come to a standstill. If no seed of loving care is sown in the untilled, abandoned land, no bud can come into flower. Singer Amy Winehouse felt like lying fallow in the ground of a wasteland "with tears dry, dying a hundred times, going back to black" and leaving eventually for a place of ultimate sorrow and heartbreak, for a point of no return. ( “Amour en friche” )
Erik Pevernagie
I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
Henry Miller
We may be willing to tell a story twice never to hear it more than once.
William Hazlitt
I wanted to buy a T-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWABLE.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz