Art Quotes - Page 560

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species.

If you could have the arms of Hercules, legs as swift as the wind. If you could leap shoulder high above the rim, have the kick of a dolphin, the reflexes of a cat. If you could have all these, you would have the body, you would have the tools. But you would not have greatness until you understand that the strongest muscle is the heart. To me, that's the soul of the Olympic Games.

And then there came into my heart a very great love for my father and I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations.

The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world. Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime.

If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant, and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers.

I hate this life of the fashionable world, always ordered, measured, ruled, like our music-paper. What I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own resources, and accountable only to myself.

I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists.

With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end.

The life I live is my art work.

In the hearts of people today there is a deep longing for peace. When the true spirit of peace is thoroughly dominant, it becomes an inner experience with unlimited possibilities. Only when this really happens - when the spirit of peace awakens and takes possession of men's hearts, can humanity be saved from perishing.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.

We will try to create conditions where persons could come together in a spirit of teamwork, and exercise to their heart's desire their technological capacity.

China restricts the society's freedom of speech. The Communist Party imposes these limits because it lacks confidence towards the future and has no ideals. Nowadays, China is experiencing the detrimental effects of such decisions. Its citizens have no creativity.

One of the most powerful sayings I have come across is by Imam ash-Shafi'I, "My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me."

The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.

Performers like Tommy Cooper, who are always getting things wrong, are much more endearing than comedians who are sassy and smart.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

Whether or not the world would be vastly benefited by a total banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks seems not now an open question. Three-fourths of mankind confess the affirmative with their tongues, and I believe all the rest acknowledge it in their hearts.

A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall. So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey which catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the highroad to his reason.

Above all am I convinced of the need, irrevocable and inescapable, of every human heart, for God. No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves in restless seeking, we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God.

The obedient in art are always the forgotten . . . The country is glorious but its beauties are unknown, and but waiting for a real live artist to splash them onto canvas . . . Chop your own path. Get off the car track.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.