Art Quotes - Page 35

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

I'm tired of 'pretentious' just being used as an excuse to dismiss anything that fucking expects you to have a brain.

...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.

There is a throne up there and someone is sitting on it. It is not you, the economy or your government. My God is still on the throne and I shall not worry.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as colored beads threaded on. When you get very good, it's as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you're the one composing.

People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

Just take my hand, lead, dance with me...and I will simply follow the blueness of the water, the white waves rolling free...where the earth beneath my feet and stars make my heart whole again...in long and priceless moments of shared solitude...

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

I grab the nearest lamppost when my knees threaten to give out, panting for breath as the words rip through me

Stop looking at the walls, look out the window.

Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye....

Art is a kind of illness.

I’m an artist; I do not destroy, but create scars. And above that, I am an inventor of new ways to create them.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words have the ability to change our lives simply by being next to each other.

You know one thing that Mr. Powell taught me? He taught me that sometimes, art can make you forget everything else all around you. That's what are can do.

But this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn't fully comprehend it at the time.

Curiosity is the art of creativity.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

And I bet it's harder than people think, isn't it? Everything looks so simple from a distance. Then, the more you look, the more you see. And that's when you have to rise to the challenge.

That is why enemies can be great motivators. They serve as fuel for your fire.

Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it -- there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery -- but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were pictures from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been throughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books.

On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with non­sense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a govern­ment or a priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult. Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad meta­physics. Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it is actually taking place? That is the question.

I take in all the colorful locks that line the bridge. Each one told a story. Each lock represented a relationship that was once special, whether it ended or turned into true happiness. The locks represented a past, present, and a possible future.

Life itself is an art form.

Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory.

Great work is not created for everyone. If it were, it would be average work.

Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

Art allows us to die over and over without actually dying. Only we must catch our breath.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

The self-esteem one acquires and a well-earned feeling of one's strength are the only consolation in this world. Income, after all, most brutes have that.

O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stay grievously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea-faring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. Vain hope – for them. The fools! Their own witlessness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.” – from Homer’s Odyssey, translation by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)

There are enough ideas, images, symbols, and experiences in your head already to work with for a lifetime. It's a little like having a car with an unpredictable battery, though. Sometimes you get in and it starts right up. Other times, especially if it has been sitting idle for awhile, you turn the key and nothing happens.

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Art is a place where tragedy meets beauty. An artist is someone who creates the most beautiful things of his life when his soul starts bleeding.

The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.

... an artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.

Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.

How can you tell when a piece is finished?'I asked.'You can't,' he said flatly. 'All you can tell is when you can't do any more to it. And then you need to stop because if you don't, you will spoil it.

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

Art is long, life is short. Unless your funding is f%$ked, in which case all our days are numbered.

Growing up in NYC,The broken sidewalks, graffiti filled subways, and humid Laundromats, did not offer solace. I found solace in the strings of my violin, in my ballet slippers at the studio, and while gazing at frescoes in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was always in the Arts that my soul was replenished.

Crafternoon is about making what you want, how you want it, to the best of your ability. And even if you may not think of yourself as a rock star of creativity, it's there inside you. At Crafternoon, you are a CraftStar.

Audrey, if you had the choice, would you rather be his muse or be in his arms?" "I want to be both. I know it's the exception rather than the rule, but I can't hepl what I want.

The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it ...Art is inconceivable without risk, without inner sacrifice; freedom and boldness of imagination can be won only in the process of work, and it is there the unforeseen I spoke of a moment ago must intervene, and there no directives can help.

Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally I did on the open road.We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art.

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious individualistic unconventional sensitive irritable.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity...

Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.

Listen to the arts of kids, their hands when tied have wings.

However my mother had once said, ‘When you go to art school, you’ll find everybody sitting around practicing how to do their signature'; and sure enough, there they were, some of them doing just that.

I abhor the supreme folly of those who blame the disciples of nature in defiance of those masters who were themselves her pupils

Orlando said it was important for scientists to have minds kept open by literature, and souls touched by the creativity of art.

Originals cost more than imitations.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed.

In many ways an artist is his work. It's difficult to separate the two. I think I can be brutally objective about my work as I create it, and if something doesn't work, I can feel it, but when I turn in a finished album — or song — you can be sure that I've given it every ounce of energy and God-given talent that I have.