c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?
— Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
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.
— Gilles Néret, Gustav Klimt: 1862-1918
There has never been any art or literature without drink and there never will be....Unless something is done about the matter [prohibition] this country is going to the dogs. There has been no development in our art or literature for 30 or 40 years.
— Joseph Pennell
How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before
— Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Her flat looked like a mess –a coloring mess. Once you enter it, you can feel like a person had eaten all the colors and paints and brushes in the whole world and threw up there. But somehow when you enter it, you wouldn’t feel the urge to throw up, actually, the colors mixed with furniture too well, the masterpieces were drawn perfectly that you feel like you are standing in an art museum.
— Basma Salem, The Art Of Black
To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part.
— William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams
Without art, a film is pure wastage of time and resources.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Film Testament
Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn't count at school because it didn't get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of Design and Technology, a free A level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink on to a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls.
— Mark Haddon, The Red House
Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history; heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.
— Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
Life is an art the one cannot erase
— Marwa A.A
The master potter was trying to create the perfect piece each time, and he would discard even the ones with the slightest flaw. So I chose to create new forms from them, because perhaps, I don’t believe completely in that kind of perfection."To me, a piece of broken ceramic finds another piece, and they come to rely on one another. The cracks between them symbolise the wound... The work is a metaphor of the struggle of life that makes people more mature and beautiful as they overcome their sufferings.
— Yeesookyung (Korean artist)
There is truth in stories. There is truth in one of your paintings, boy, or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.
— Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows
Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.
— Kamand Kojouri
To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
An artistic person taps into the destructive emotional energy of guilt and shame and the longing to love and be loveable and transforms these powerful emotions into a creative force.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Pablo Picasso was notorious for sucking the energy out of the people he met. His granddaughter Marina claimed that he squeezed people like one of his tubes of oil paints. You's have a great time hanging out all day with Picasso, and then you's go home nervous and exhausted, and Picasso would go back to his studio and paint all night, using the energy he'd sucked out of you.
— Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
Art helps you connect to the world, not escape from it. That is the difference between art and entertainment.
— James Rozoff
We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.
— Marcel Proust
It was held that the six great arts – visual art (including architecture and photography), drama, dance, music, film and literature – form a family of related, if largely autonomous, practices: they all work through the aesthetic, all address the imagination, and all are concerned with the symbolic embodiment of human meaning.
— Peter Abbs
No one ever claimed that creating art was simple. But they failed to mention the mess.
— F.K. Preston
But you possess one quality that no one else does. Oh? Your identity. Your history, deeds and situation. Use those to shape your creation and you will produce something unique. Whatever you make, base it upon that which is most important to you. Only then will it have depth and meaning, and only then will it resonate with others.
— Christopher Paolini, Eldest
God design of you is divine act.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
When life, inspiration, and pen meet.
— Valdas Partee
It is not sufficient for artistic expressions to serve as "signposts declaring what it is to be fully human." They should impart a vision of what it can be to become divine.
— Ron Brackin
Art fuels the fire inside me.
— Efrat Cybulkiewicz
Art manifests itself in paradoxical ways. At times it creates and at times it gets created!
— Avijeet Das
The music is all around us, all you have to do is listen.
— August Rush
Art doesn’t bare itself to just anyone, but to believers called artists.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
An artist is merely a tool with which art molds itself.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Critics are only concerned with what affects them. And feeling empathy is a gift not many possess.
— Efrat Cybulkiewicz
Masochists hold on to broken people. Artists hold on to broken memories.
— Dominic Riccitello
There are few better ways to get to know how a species thinks than to learn their art.
— Becky  Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit
Self-destruction is an art
—  cursed are the exponents.
When Design become Useless it becomes Art. Yesterday's Artisans are today's Artists.
— Vineet Raj Kapoor
I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.
— Mark Rothko
I look up at the painting. It's not even that interesting. Definitely doesn't grab me and shake my brain around like the meadow scene did.
— Stefan Bachmann, A Drop of Night
For Art alone is great:The bust survives the state, The crown the potentate.
— Théophile Gautier, Émaux et Camées
Because art is a scream, even when it hides itself somewhere, you will find it!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
She must disappear for a time from the human surface,And sacrifice everything for this, To recreate herself from the depths of her world.
— David Foenkinos, Charlotte
Words do not always need a destination.We can leave them behind us at the borders of feelings.Running around headless in the vague zone.And that is the privilege of artists: to live in confusion.
— David Foenkinos, Charlotte
Art is the medium through which you express the inexpressible, convey the unconveyable, transporting the audience in different realms of existence erasing their mental identities. Any effort by the artist to make an personal identity is detrimental in an artistic sense. Be Wiser, leave no residue, dissolve in ART!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
My artwork isn't evolving, it's deconstructing, and I don't know why.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
My response to stress is just as complex as my artwork.
— Efrat Cybulkiewicz
All great talents are never found in rich exquisite locales with perfect setting that enhance their creative works, but on the contrary are found in the most obnoxious circumstances yet are unaffected by them and create masterpieces at the most unpredictable situations, just like a lotus flower blossoming in a muddy pond!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting
— Leonardo da Vinci, Thoughts on Art and Life
How can we expect to know everything about God?"He looked at me, his eyes narrowing."I call that ambiguity," I said. "Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to the darkness, different perspectives on the same thing. Nothing in this whole world has only one side to it. Everything is like a kaleidoscope. That's what I'm trying to capture in my art. That's what I mean by ambiguity.
— Chaim Potok, The Gift of Asher Lev
When art sets racism in the past, no matter how good it is, it allows white people in the audience (and others) to say to themselves "Wow! That racism sure was bad way back then!" It's what happens when people go see 12 Years a Slave. My response is always, "Yeah, you wanna know another time when racism was bad? Earlier today.
— W. Kamau Bell, The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6' 4", African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama's Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian
Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan
Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.
— Philip Pullman, The Broken Bridge
I must have flowers, always and always.
— Claude Monet
A good artist does not just make imaginations beautiful to the mind, but also more pleasant to the eye with a superb visible touch of excellence.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Let us salute all the shadows of this world for the brilliant and enigmatical art they create day and night!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
A piece of art only succeeds when it's creator...possesses the belief that brings it into being
— Jessie Burton, The Muse
Judging art is like caging a bird. Instead of seeing it soar, you can only watch it flutter.
— Ron Brackin
A good artist makes imaginations real!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Here, however, you made art because it was the only thing you've ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Art should be for sale. The artist should not.
— A.E. Samaan
[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.
— Edward Bond, The Worlds, with the Activists Papers
I believe, that creating is a joyful activity as well as a meaningful suffer, and thus, it is an integral part of the human nature.
— Gabor Gürtler
A month passed in silence and then came an email asking if Qayennat would care to further amend, fortify or prune various sections of her proposal; Like all communication for them so far, this was well written and polite but abhorrent in its covert attempt to stamp out anything like love, to turn passion into hot air. She wanted to tell them as much, inviting them to take their stuffy foundation and stuff it up their backside
— Anjum Hasan, THE COSMOPOLITANS
The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.
— Edward Bond, Plays 4: The Worlds / The Activists Papers / Restoration / Summer
The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a treacherous and sinister body of water whose eddies and currents yearly claim many lives. I have never known anyone who would even venture to stick his toe in its polluted waters, which seethe with sewage, industrial waste, and deadly insecticides. Even the fish are dying. Therefore, the Mississippi as Father-God-Moses-Daddy-Phallus-Pops is an altogether false motif began, I would imagine, by that dreary fraud, Mark Twain. This failure to make contact with reality is, however, characteristic of almost all of America’s “art.” Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for this who do know reality when they see it.
— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
If you're to explain your works, then surely you have chosen wrong audience!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
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?
— Ramana Pemmaraju
I write things down because my thoughts get too heavy in my head and it hurts my neck.
— Joyce Rachelle
They always tell you to do what you love. But they forget to add that writing doesn't pay by the hour.
— Joyce Rachelle
Note to myself - It is time for me to start taking my guitar lessons. One of my neighbor's singing and guitar strumming skills are so cool that I can't stop marveling at the music wafting around here.
— Avijeet Das
cademics and intellectuals are culture vultures. In a gathering of today’s elite, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh that you barely passed Physics for Poets and Rocks for Jocks and have remained ignorant of science ever since, despite the obvious importance of scientific literacy to informed choices about personal health and public policy. But saying that you have never heard of James Joyce or that you tried listening to Mozart once but prefer Andrew Lloyd Webber is as shocking as blowing your nose on your sleeve or announcing that you employ children in your sweatshop, despite the obvious unimportance of your tastes in leisure-time activity to just about anything.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Always good to remember when you're making art. You don't have to like it, just be ready to do the next thing.
— Neil Gaiman
[Women] are conditioned to ever prove ourselves, as if our value is contingent on our ability to meet the expectations of others. As if our worth is a tank forever draining that we must fill and fill. We complete tasks and in some half-buried way believe that if we don’t, we will be discredited. Sometimes, this is true. But here is a question: Do you want to be a reliable source of literary art (or whatever writing you do), or of prompt emails?
— Melissa Febos
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! … Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!
— Henry Miller, To Paint Is To Love Again
Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.
— Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it.
— Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maidenlike, guest in a hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. The man who combines both characters – the knight – is not a work of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.
— C.S. Lewis
No I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, 'Painting is a blind man's profession' and 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing.' And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything ia true at once. Life is contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.
— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun
Every second in the air in Paris is art.
— Robert  Black
What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
— Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
— J.M. Coetzee, Youth
Art--music, painting, sculpture, dance, drama--opens doors to our soul, exposing our lives to whom or what we allow to enter.
— Ron Brackin
God created us for play and amusement just as he created us for work, prayer, and community. In particular he created us for art and culture: to create and look at images; to fashion stories and music and dance, and to perform and enjoy them; to explore imaginative scenarios of good and evil, of conflict and resolution.It is in our nature to engage in and to enjoy these things, as it is the nature of stars to shine and plants to grow. And, just as the sun glorifies God by shining and plants by growing, so we please and glorify him when we participate in wholesome aesthetic activities and amusements. In fact, because man has free will, he pleases God in a special way when he freely participates in the goods proper to his nature. If he does so with a will to glorify God, it can even be meritorious
— Steven D. Greydanus.
All art moves between the extremes.
— Jan Fries, Visual Magick: A Manual of Freestyle Shamanism
Only the painter who knows his business can create the impression that a picture was done in one stroke.
— Auguste Renoir
I am bothered by poems I don't understand.
— Joyce Rachelle
Communication is not using beautiful and complex words to impress, but its all about expressing our truest emotions using simple words!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer.
— Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
The only thing that made the music different was that we were taking lyrics to places they had never been before. The thing that makes art interesting is when an artist has incredible pain or incredible rage. The New York bands were much more into their pain, while the English bands were much more into their rage. The Sex Pistols' songs were written out of anger, wheras Johnny was writing songs because he was brokenhearted over Sable...
— Legs McNeil, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Art can blow us out of our pigeon hole. In deafness it may shout or scream, in blindness it may arrest our attention, in numbness it may shake up our mind. If we don’t sense anything at all and take everything for granted, art can kick us in the ass, give a conscience and make us aware. ("When is Art?")
— Erik Pevernagie
One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness, which nevertheless has light in it.
— Vincent van Gogh, Cartas a Theo
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.
— Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris
Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!
— Morrissey
I'm being pulled under - father and farther from the surface. My lungs continue to scream for air. Panic is building inside me, threatening to combust. I can't break free.Help! I can't break free!I open my mouth to scream.
— Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris
I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful. Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me.
— Nikki Rowe
Planning is a skill and an art which takes a lifetime to master
— Paddick Van Zyl
One of his hands move away from my face to flatten against my back, pulling me closer to him as he deepens the kiss. He parts my lips under his as my mind seems to sign quietly in content. I kiss him back as fiercely as he kisses me, unable to control the infatuation that rushes through me - feeling almost like fireworks. Not so careful anymore.Little shivers of urgency shoot through me. I push off the window, pressing closer to him. The rush of sensation that is coursing through me feels like I've drunk a gallon of coffee. It feels like an electric buzz is flooding between us.
— Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris
Are you an artist?""I'm a mess is what I am," he says, holding on to the building for support. "A bloody mess. You 're the artist, mate." Then he's gone.
— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun
LABOUR is effort, while ART is effortless! What are you?
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Night has settled over Paris.The streets have cleared of the crowds, and the city has been lit up. I set my book down, deciding to go for a walk. The Eiffel Tower is only a few blocks away. Now that there aren't many people out, I can walk there without having to fight my way through mobs of gawking tourists.
— Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris
He drinks his coffee tentatively, glancing at me every few seconds, watching me. Every time he glances in my direction, I quickly turn away though he obviously knows I'm watching him. I know he's wondering why I'm staring at him, but he doesn't ask.I finally take a sip of coffee, set the mug back on the table, and voice what's on my mind, "I want to draw you.
— Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris
Art that most inspires are the ones that pay attention to aspects of the subconscious condition that we are too busy to notice.
— VD.
God gave you the art to talk and you will just ignore it like these?
— Deyth Banger
The human spirit’s unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We view art in order to escape our own skins, to get outside of the commotion inside our skulls.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Nothing's better for art than a little old-fashioned suffering.
— J.C. Lillis, A&B
Don't be fooled into thinking that love is special. That it'll fill you up forever. Anyone can fall in love, but only you can make the art you were born for. And that's the kind of happiness that lasts.
— J.C. Lillis, A&B
Art doesn't depend on suffering. That's a crock. It's about discipline. Showing up to do the thing you do. It's about watching and listening to the world and telling the truth with your own voice. It's about learning from what other people make, whether it's good or bad. And the most important thing? It's about taking care of yourself. So you can keep making and finishing your shit, for as long as you can.
— J.C. Lillis, A&B
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.
— Henry James, The Art of Fiction
The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.
— Jeanette Winterson
Art becomes art only when it’s shared with others.
— Ben Tolosa, Masterplan Your Success
Good. That is it. You will see with your hands, I promise you.
— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun
True mastery transcends any particular art. It stems from mastery of oneself--the ability, developed through self-discipline, to be calm, fully aware, and completely in tune with oneself and the surroundings. Then, and only then, can a person know himself.
— Bruce Lee
Art allows us to die over and over without actually dying. Only we must catch our breath.
— Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World
Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist’s life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes their unconsciousness thoughts, feelings, and prejudices conscious through acts of contemplation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.
— Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.
— J.M.W. Turner
To those that are not accustomed to it the inner beauty appears as ugliness because humanity in general inclines to the outer and knows nothing of the inner.
— Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
God’s creation is the greatest of all arts.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
All of life is an amphitheater where we each serve as an appreciative member of the audience until the sublime play ends with our death. The chapters and verses in our life story reflect what we value – how appreciative we are for our time to work, play, laugh, cry, and create.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An artist is one who has mastered the art of dissolving himself so completely that only his work remains!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time’s destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind’s struggles and accomplishments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
— Tracy Weinzapfel
Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.
— Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
I let quiet shape what I say, then realize there is nothing that can be fully said—the reason for gestures and eyes and art. Always something waiting, wanting, expectant, yet also curiously not.
— Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World
Do you want to know why I don't like the so-called connoisseurs of arts? I hate hypocrisy. I'll give you an example: if the movie is colored and tells us about two friends who sit in the pool, fart into the water, get out of the pool and fart into each other's face it will be thrash, a lack of a culture and a third-rate comedy. But if the movie is black-and-white and tells us about two friends who cross the desert and peeing on each other, shit on the sand, and then they eat each other's shit, and on top of that they fucking each other's ass it will be a brilliant art house movie.
— Ilze Falb, Thinkilzing
An artist is one who has mastered the art of dissolving himself through his works!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
These two developments throw light on what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Renaissance and all previous periods of art. We have repeatedly seen that there were these circumstances which could compel the artist to make a distinction between the "technical" proportions and the "objective;" the influence of organic movement, the influence of perspective foreshortening, and the regard for the visual impression of the beholder. These three factors of variation have one thing in common: they all presuppose the artistic recognition of subjectivity. Organic movement introduces into the calculus of artistic composition the subjective will and the subjective emotions of the thing represented; foreshortening the subjective visual experience of the artist; and those "eurhythmic" adjustments which alter that which is right in favor of what seems right, the subjective visual experience of a potential beholder. And it is the Renaissance which, for the first time, not only affirms but formally legitimizes and rationalizes these three forms of subjectivity.
— Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts
Music is energy, emotion, expression, escapism, enlightenment. Music is so much more than just entertainment.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.
— Kamand Kojouri
Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays
I'll write about my past but I won't talk about it. I'll turn it into art if I can, but I won't talk about it.
— Anne Rice, The Witching Hour
Some art are meant to cut shortstretching them unnecessary makes it dull.
— Yarro Rai
An artist is like a handicaphe needs his art to carry himself.
— Yarro Rai
Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.
— Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts
Art is the greatest opportunity to admire the human mind!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Many works would be senseless, real junk, but for the fact that, being art, they are exhibited because they have a message of almost religious importance, interpreting man and his world - yes, perhaps even as junk.
— H. R. Rookmaaker, A arte moderna e a morte de uma cultura
Nobody is better than me.
— Jason Innocent
I'm the greatest living thing in the universe.
— Jason Innocent
Even creating shit is hard to do. First, you need money to buy food. Then you have to chew it, eat it, and swallow. A complex process called digestion follows. Finally, you have to strain and excrete your foul smelling wonder into the world. Try doing that with a paint brush!
— Jonathan Heatt
The harder you work, the more you produce, the more you create, the more you will be rejected. By people who never created shit.
— Jonathan Heatt
There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human.
— Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories
They were both poles apartOne a ready masterpieceAnother an unfinished art...
— Shonali Dey
Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard.
— Janet Fitch, Paint it Black
Art is humanity's most essential, most universal language. It is not a frill, but a necessary part of communication.
— Ernest L. Boyer
Choose only one master — Nature.
— Rembrandt, Rembrandt Drawings
There's a mysterious alter ego in everyone. Some call it hallucination, some call it art.
— Bhavik Sarkhedi, The Weak Point Dealer
The consensus seems to be this: we should be deeply Christian artists. But that doesn't mean we should be something called Christian artists or that whatever we produce should be called Christian art. We should simply focus on our craft, on making the best art we can. We should understand that people will and should resonate with our work not because it is Christian but because it is good. Above all, Christians should make good art, true art; art unafraid of exploring mystery, portraying evil, and looking for truth wherever it appears.
— Brett McCracken, Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide
What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
I loved it when my heart beat quickly and erratically. Yet I found this performance, which was deeply poetic, more enjoyable.
— Raymond Radiguet, The Devil in the Flesh
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
— Frédéric Chopin
He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does.
— Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
It's so warm it's almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I've never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It's never sentimental. It's generous, but it's sardonic too. And whenever it's sardonic, a moment later it's generous again.
— Ali Smith, How to Be Both
When we are writing or painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions and opened to a wider world, where colours are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
He stares at me—taking me in—with his lips slightly parted. I struggle to hold myself in place as we gawk at each other. I want so desperately to run, but something is holding me back, keeping me in place.
— Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris
...any talent - whether to write songs or to write novels...came with the obligation to use it to the fullest of one's ability, with a fierce commitment barely distinguishable from neurotic obsession. ... In fact...commitment to the point of obsession wasn't merely an obligation but a necessity...
— Dean Koontz
But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures.He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's.He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to.He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?
— Jojo Moyes, Paris for One
I can't keep myself from creativity. Ideas flash like lightning burning my bones. It must flow out of my hands or it will burst me apart.
— Patricia Robin Woodruff
If the past is no longer presentis it fiction?
— Natasha Tsakos
Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.
— Pawan Mishra
When you find your passion, turn a deaf ear to the naysayers and follow your dreams.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
Spend one more day in pursuit of art that only you can produce, and somewhere, someone is envying your courage to do just that.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
Putting our art out there is one of the biggest risks we can take. It's a special kind of vulnerability. It takes guts to be an artist.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
I've realized I don't need to keep looking for my path. I'm already on it. I just need to trust where it leads.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
As artists, it is our job to question the rules and ask if they are relevant or outdated, necessary or arbitrary, helpful or oppressive.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
If you build a wall to separate people, there will be those who find a way around the wall, or over it, or under it, or through it. We humans are not meant to be contained, and neither are our thoughts.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.
— John Berger, Another Way of Telling
If your art is calling to you, its doing so for a reason. You are feeling a pull toward something for which your soul is yearning.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
...a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake
It's ever so fun and fulfilling to be clever, but more lasting and effective to be consistent.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
Never let your goals or convictions get in the way of living your life. It's not about who dies with more, it's about who lived the most.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
In times of trouble, people need artists. We create those spaces where their own pain and worry and sadness can rest, and where their broken hearts can hope again.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
As with everything else, the more we separate ourselves from each other, the weaker we become.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that “we must have like to produce like.” In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that “all is given.” Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need.
— Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
We tend to think that what matters is decided by society or culture or religion or our peers, but no one can say what truly matters except us.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.
— G.K. Chesterton
It's clever, but is it art?
— Rudyard Kipling
A drawing is a translation. That is to say each mark on the paper is consciously realted, not only to the real or imagined "model", but also to every mark and space already set out on the paper. Thus a drawn or painted image is woven together by the energy (or the lassitude, wen the drawing is weak) of countless judgements [sic]. Every time a figuration is evoked in a drawing, everything about it has been mediated by consciousness, either intuitively or systematically.
— John Berger
My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.
— Leela Corman, We All Wish For Deadly Force
If you haven't proclaimed it in your own life, do it now. Say, "I am an artist.
— Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog
It's the sketch Edward did of me before he went away, the one he said was fine but didn't want to keep. It's as if he's drawn me not once but twice. In the main drawing I have my head turned to the right. It's so detailed, you can see the tautness of my neck muscles and the arch of my clavicle. But underneath or over that there's a second drawing, barely more than a few jagged, suggestive lines, done with a surprising energy and violence: my head turned the other way, my mouth open in a kind of snarl. The two heads pointing in opposite directions give the drawing a disturbing sense of movement.Which one's the pentimento, and which the finished thing? And why did Edward say there was nothing wrong with it? Did he not want me to see this double image for some reason?
— J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before