Art Quotes - Page 6

Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people--including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh--struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124)

Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?

No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.

So you can't make a living as a novelist—why not try farming or teaching? Or even begging—what difficulties would that present? Were you born into the world to make a living? Or have you another aim, that of becoming a novelist or something akin? If you want to become a novelist but are worried about how you will eat, then let me share my bowl of rice with you (thoughI am not as well off as I once was). If, in return, you become a great novelist,it will be my greatest joy. . . . I do not presume to urge you to become a novelist. I say only this—be firm of purpose and don't worry about trivialities.And remember the saying: the final tax you pay to achieve your goal is your life.

This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life.

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.

The hours tick by as I lie in bed.Memories keep surfacing, tormenting me into unbelievable sadness. I can't bring myself to move. I can't fight the memories that keep filling my thoughts. I stay curled in the fetal position as each memory plays out. I can't stop them from coming. I can't make them go away. Nothing can distract me. I can't block the memories, so they continue to come.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.

When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?

Life is a work of art, and what you see depends on your perspective.

Everything is fair in love and art.

Being married or being in a close relationship is not based on how quickly you can get offended but on how you are ready to drop the offences, get over it and move ahead.

Being an innovator is something that most people just won't get. It's still yummy doing this thang over here though. The older I get I've come to place where I just love to create so much that I do me regardless of what it looks like to anyone else. Just think: The people in the world who just know they'll make it (In their way) regardless- Always make it to their chosen destinations. It's wonderful to see. So DO you always, And do so unapologetically with happiness! Peace and love.

A museum is a place where nothing was lost, just rediscovered…

I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

God's perspectives requires persistence. To have God's perspective in the world we live in requires persistence.

I know that life is busy and hard and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making your art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable.

In the land of the rejected, the field is flattened, open to much oppurtunity. Here flourish the weeds and nonstandard quality alike. No one aspires, because there is no pinnacle to reach — just be better than whoever is next to you. It is basic, fundamental, and often rude, with bonus points for creative solution. Hardly ever about who you are, but how you do, it's "run what you brung" not Formula 1.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.

Don't think because you can't affect something at a great level that God can't use you in a great way. David didn't even train one day with the armies but He won the war. He didn't even have a weapon but he killed a giant.

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.

One should not confuse creativity with whining.

The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some *quality* of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God.

I want you to trust yourself, baby. Love is all that matters and you’ve always known that. You’ve known, since you were a very little girl, what your life is meant to be about…

We need heroes, however outlandish, because although we might not be slaying real dragons, we all have our quests.

My work has always tried to unite the True with the Beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the Beautiful.

Men say they know many things;But lo! they have taken wings, —The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows

I love a good 2,000 year old storytelling fresco!

A Gift for YouI send you...A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is a cabinet near the front door, where your favorite meals appear, several times a day. Desserts are plentiful and calorie free. The closet is stocked with colorful robes and pajamas, and a painting in the bedroom slides aside to reveal a plasma television screen with every movie you've ever wanted to watch. A wooden mailbox at the end of the lane is filled daily with beguiling invitations to tea parties, horse-and-carriage rides, theatrical performances, and violin concerts. There is no obligation or need to respond. You sleep deeply and peacefully each night, and feel profoundly healthy. This cottage is yours to return to at any time.

The enemies agenda is destruction, his strategy is division and his tactics is on little differences. Mind you he is not going to be happy until he sees you divided.

Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.

In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.

Art is the bridge across the gap between peoples and cultures. Writing is one of the arts that can help link people.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that's what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.

The journey of the sun and moon is predictable. But yours, is your ultimate art.

Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause--a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art--for me, of fiction--is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life.

Art is not an end in itself but a means of addressing humanity.

Rose's work of art took her all day, including two playtimes, story time, and most of lunch.At the end of school it was stolen from her by the wicked teacher who had pretended to be so interested."Beautiful- what-is-it?" she asked as she pinned it high on the wall, where Rose could not reach."They take your pictures," said Indigo,... when he finally made out what all the roaring and stamping was about. "They do take them.... Why do you want that picture so much?" he asked Rose."It was my best ever," said Rose furiously. "I hate school. I hate everyone in it. I will kill them all when I'm big enough.""You can't just go round killing people," Indigo told her...

Movement is knowledge. Art is perception

We would go out and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted.

There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Lyotard develops and extends Weber's argument regarding the disenchantment of art to suggest the Western culture increasingly obeys an instrumental logic of performance and control, one that imposes order on the free play of the imagination and subordinates creative thought to the demands of the capitalist market. And, for Lyotard, the effects of this process are consistent with those outlined in Weber's work, namely the progressive elimination of ritual or religious forms of art, the restriction of creative forms by an instrumental (capitalist) rationality, and with this the denigration of value-rational artistic practice.

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.

Sometimes we want God to use us to do big things when we would not even want to do the basics.

You don't have to feel grateful in order to be grateful.

[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.

Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn’s amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.