Art Quotes - Page 501

Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.

There's no such thing as a painless lesson. They just don't exist. Sacrifices are necessary. You can't gain anything without losing something first although if you can endure that pain and walk away from it, you'll find that you now have a heart strong enough to overcome any obstacle. Yeah, a heart made fullmetal.

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it - as with these - life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

There is nothing like the first hot days of spring when the gardener stops wondering if it's too soon to plant the dahlias and starts wondering if it's too late. Even the most beautiful weather will not allay the gardener's notion (well-founded actually) that he is somehow too late, too soon, or that he has too much stuff going on or not enough. For the garden is the stage on which the gardener exults and agonizes out every crest and chasm of the heart.

Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time.

The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we'll ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise-it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, the man with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize Paradise even when he is shown it.

Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!

Sin had no sooner come into the world than God came in grace seeking the sinner, and so from the first question, 'Adam, where art thou?' on to the incarnation, God has been speaking to man.

The heart overwhelmed by grief knows no rest.

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her imagination, and then they both speak of it as an affair of 'the heart.

Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man.

Freedom is not won on the battlefields. The chance for freedom is won there. The final battle is won or lost in our hearts and minds.

The real treasure, that which we all seek, is never very far; there is no real need to seek it in a distant place, for it lies buried within our own hearts. And yet, there is this strange and persistent fact that it is only after a journey in a distant region, in a new land, that the way to that treasure becomes clear.

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies-- but not before they have been hanged.

If you are talented, you can really do anything. And if your heart is at the right place and you have the passion for it, you can go for it and do it.

Why go to the ends of the earth if you have nothing to give?

A great accomplishment shouldn't be the end of the road, just the starting point for the next leap forward.

What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.

Why don't you make your whole body into a string and play the music of the vibratory electromagnetic self, which is your creativity, and project to the heart of another person?

Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power. While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

That two bodies press convulsively together, man and woman, he fertilizing her, he giving her a budding life, or he planting a seed, a seed of life in her womb - Oh God. I think this God-given idea is so enormous, so eternal, so endlessly wise - that people should not be allowed to depict it in art!!

Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water.

The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.