Artists Quotes - Page 2

I'm like a circus standing on two legs.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What wedo with them...I think that’s what makes us artists.

The painter knew that color was not something you controlled but something you set free. He believed that color knew its way home.

An artist is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.

After all, Paul Robeson said, ‘Artists are the radical voice of civilization.’ Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what’s better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species.

Despair and disappointment are the parent of countless inspired, inspiring, triumphant creations

I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate words that ring true.

The secret of good magic is another magic.

For me, every week is a fashion week.

The human mind’s innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment.

You can't force creatives into a box. If you try, they'll no longer be creative. And no one will want your box.

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.

Having a camera is not enough. You must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold!

If both the performer and audience are on the same plane then it's not ART but SCIENCE, for ART is a personal expression that varies from one individual to another, while SCIENCE commands uniformity & certainty! What are YOU?

Art has the ability to change minds. Passion is what changes the world. When both collide, it's as powerful as a bomb. Art isn't pretty and poised fluff. Art is brutal and snarling. Artists growl. This is the roar of change that beats within them. - 8/29/11

Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.

The first thousand are the hardest.

I wonder if only artists can feel peace like this—such a gentle, inconspicuous peace that an ordinary person might not even notice.

When a dancer performs, melody transforms into a carriage, expressions turn into fuel and spirit experiences a journey to a world where passion attains fulfillment.

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.

But why? Why do you care about our class’s history?"t"I just do. Besides, I need something to put on my art-school applications besides ’Locks self in room and draws all day.’ Even art schools won’t take a psychopath.

The God who impoverished himself is also the God of abundance, and somehow, perhaps at times nonsensically, Christians are called to live out of an ethic not of scarcity but of abundance—an abundance that extends both to the homeless neighbor and to the artist neighbor. . .

France, stop throwing awards at me! I have so many already, give them to people who need them.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

If you are really bored with life, just meet a decent magician and have a close up magic show, he will restore inspiration in your life.

If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.

With the manipulation of abstract symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

Artist colonies are notorious for breaking up marriages and housing affairs.

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of moral human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use...If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer...Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. (pg. 316, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)

Every parent is an artist, but not every artist is apparent.

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

Art should be for sale. The artist should not.

An art prodigy of the 21st century has yet to be crowned. Or have they?

The language of worldview tends to imply...that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking "worldviewishly" is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which "worldview thinkers" are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside.But culture is not changed simply by thinking.

My childhood was a drag show!

He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.

Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.

What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.

The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into groups.

Sometimes people are shocked by what I do, but I'm not trying to be liked, I speak my mind and I don't care what people think. I truly do not compromise on who I am.

The dictators, commanders or emperors who want to conquer the world soon realize that the world has already been conquered by the artists and their arts!

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious?

While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.

We are defined as artists by the pull of our hearts, not the creation of our hands.

It’s a shame how much artists have to bleed for people to enjoy their work.

No matter how many times audience has already applauded, the sound of their applause will get louder with the better quality of your magic effect.

Art lovers ought to be crazy.That's how they see the fun side of everything.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

We can never be entirely original, as artists or as people. The genius and vision of those who came before us is too great for us to digress from entirely. Though, as creatures that are compelled to test and surpass our own creative abilities, we must always strive for that originality in everything we do in order to move the world forward.

Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.

For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead.