c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Molly. I have an opportunity for you.”“An opportunity?” I repeated, without enthusiasm. Oh, good. Next comes the part where he tells me to be a “team player” and then dumps some tedious task on me.“It’s a chance for you to show that you can be a team player,” Bill Vogel said.
— Frankie Bow, The Musubi Murder
I couldn’t bring myself to call him either “Bill,” which would signal friendly familiarity, or “Doctor Vogel,” which would imply respect.
— Frankie Bow, The Musubi Murder
A few of the managers we spoke with for this book worried that the tour of duty framework might give employees "permission" to leave. But permission is not yours to give or to withhold, and believing you have that power is simply a self-deception that leads to a dishonest relationship with your employees. Employees don't need your permission to switch companies, and if you try to assert that right, they'll simply make their move behind your back.
— Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
Great leaders catch and correct problems while they’re still small and able to be managed without a lot of hassle. If ignored too long, small problems will morph into much bigger issues that will require more time and effort and at a high cost, causing a great deal of disruption and stress.
— Beth Ramsay, #Networking is people looking for people looking for people
Delegation is not a binary thing. There are shades of grey between a dictatorship and an anarchy.
— Jurgen Appelo, #Workout: Games, Tools & Practices to Engage People, Improve Work, and Delight Clients
To foster a solution mindset, tell employees that you are not interested in who or what caused the problem. You are only interested in hearing how we plan to go beyond the problem.
— Jag Randhawa, The Bright Idea Box: A Proven System to Drive Employee Engagement and Innovation
Managers who inspire extraordinary loyalty from their people tend to be highly charismatic, humorous, good-looking, and tall. So, by all means, strive to be those things. If you don't feel able to improve any of those factors very much, you might consider holding on to your people by designing a little slack into their lives.
— Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
Now If diversity were inherently good, inherently valuable, inherently wonderful, why would we have to have the highly-paid profession know as 'diversity consultant' to manage it? Things that are inherently good, to enjoy them, or to make the most of them, you don't need a consultant. You don't need a consultant to make the most out of good-tasting food, beautiful weather, the affection of your friends. Those are inherently good things. Diversity required consultants because diversity is hard. Diversity is difficult. It's because it's difficult for people to try to work, to act, and live together with people are are unlike themselves.
— Jared Taylor
Leadership is the influence of a person(s) on another person(s) which guides their efforts in a specific direction, with more purpose, clarity, and unity than they would have held on their own.
— Michael A. Wood Jr.
It can be dangerous to be right at the outset. Managers in some LCD-first companies interpreted the pivot point as an unconditional endorsement of everything they had been doing. As a result, they failed to recognize the need to rethink some details of their technology, such as the importance of color displays, and their complacency helped former plasma companies pull ahead.
— J. P. Eggers
The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash.
— Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
When we think we can manage our time, our circumstances, and our relationships without His help and inspiration, we know what unmanageability is.
— Toni Sorenson
I am fascinated at how much time we spend doing things that we don’t enjoy.
— Daniel Willey
Increasingly, management’s role is not to organize work, but to direct passion and purpose.
— Greg Satell
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
— Vijay Dhameliya
Banishing those evil twins:-Talk about values-Don’t assume people understand your motives-Don’t be above explaining yourself-Dare to invite feedback-Understand the impact of good intention
— gill geisler
The operating management, providing as it does for the care of near thirty thousand miles of railway, is far more important than that for construction in which there is comparatively little doing.
— John Bloomfield Jervis
I call these lessons ‘learned on the fly’ because the knowledge gained from the experiences connected with them were very much akin to the spirit of the centerfielder in baseball running backward at full speed, looking towards the heavens, trying to not lose sight of the ball or fail to notice the sensation of gravel from the warning track under his cleats as he knowingly approaches the blindside impact of an outfield wall. His focused intention guides him into trying to make the catch that will save the game for his team, his city and the harmony of the moment, despite the foreboding threat of a pending collision. Decisions in these situations are made in an instant. One weighs the purpose of the game, the success of the catch and one’s own safety of survival in a fleeting moment, and in all hopes one lives to tell about it in the glow of great success.
— Michael Delaware, The Art of Sales Management: Lessons Learned on the Fly
Wait. You work for me?""I prefer to think of it as managing your incompetence.
— Jim Butcher, Cold Days
The Four Keys of Great Managers:1. "When selecting someone, they select for talent ... not simply experience, intelligence or determination."2. "When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes ... not the right steps."3. "When motivating someone, they focus on strengths ... not on weaknesses."4. "When developing someone, they help him find the right fit ... not simply the next rung on the ladder.
— Marcus Buckingham
To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.
— Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker
Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice....Identify a person's strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.
— Marcus Buckingham
People. Products. Profits. In that order.
— Ken  Goldstein
Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.
— Marcus Buckingham
In fact, over the last twenty years, authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership.
— Marcus Buckingham, First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently
The moment you start building or doing stuff beyond your knowledge, soon you will end up by demanding time.
— Ajeet Pratap Maurya
The rationales for centralized, to-down decision making - control, direction, and compliance - melts away when individuals are tightly aligned with the company's values and goals, accountable for their actions, and self-regulated.
— Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business
Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers: People don't change that much.Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out.Try to draw out what was left in.That is hard enough.
— Marcus Buckingham
Managers are encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics.
— Marcus Buckingham, First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently
We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?
— Shirley Graham Du Bois
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. 
— William S. Burroughs
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
— Pablo Picasso
Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.
— Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Netochka Nezvanova
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.
— Jay-Z, Decoded
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
But why? Why do you care about our class’s history?"	"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.
— Natalie Standiford, How to Say Goodbye in Robot
It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Lucien, women are wondrous, mysterious, and magical creatures, who should be treated not only with respect but with reverence, perhaps even awe. Now go sweep the steps.
— Christopher Moore
...and as far as talent is concerned, there will be such an excess that our artists will become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.
— Hermann Hesse
A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
...As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.
— Ice-T, Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption-from South Central to Hollywood
... but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.
— Pauline Gedge, The Eagle and the Raven
The most visible creators are those artists whose medium is life itself. The ones who express the inexpressible ~ without brush, hammer, clay, or guitar. They neither paint nor sculpt. Their medium is simply being. Whatever their presence touches has increased life. They see, but don't have to draw...Because they are the artists of being alive... :) ~ ☆ ~ Donna J. Stone
— Donna J. Stone
A lot of excellent illustrators are working at the moment--especially in fantasy and children's books. It is exciting also to see graphic artists such as Dave McKean, in his film Mirrormask, moving between different media. I also greatly admire the more traditional work of Gennady Spirin and Roberto Innocenti. Kinuko Craft, John Jude Palencar, John Howe, Charles Vess, Brian Froud ... I'll stop there, as the list would get too long. But--in a fit of pride and justified nepotism--I'll add my daughter, Virginia Lee, to the list. Her first illustrated children's book, The Frog Bride [coming out in the U.K. in September, 2007], will be lovely.
— Alan Lee
Everyone should have a hippie painter anarchist in their lives. It's the guys in silvered aviators with guns that you've got to be wary of.
— John Sandford, Rampage
As artists, we create the beautyWe are too afraid to live outAnd search, but always fall just shyOf finding what life is about.
— Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe
Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it’s an almost losing battle against it.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
Artists are social sensors and transmitters of ideas
— Natasha Tsakos
Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing
— Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist
—  they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
The creation of a painting takes as much trickery and premeditation as the commitment of a crime.
— Edgar Degas
Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.
— Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence
This guy! I plead the fifth. This guy is nuts.”- Eminem“Dope questions, man. Very insightful, very thoughtful.”- Guru (Gang Starr)“You like a Psychiatrist or some shit? This shit is just coming out but go ahead.”- Mary J. Blige“Definitely a real interview! Digging deep up in there, man. Not afraid to ask questions!”- K-Ci Hailey (Jodeci)“The Wizard asked me for a copy of your magazine.”- Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk)“You didn’t wear your glasses and you haven’t carried your hearing aid. What else is wrong with you?”- Bushwick Bill“Peace and blessing, Brother Harris. Thank you for inspiring my words. Keep ‘yo balance.”- Erykah Badu“Can I see that pen?”- Bobby Brown“What else do you want to know? Talk to me.”- Aaliyah
— Harris Rosen
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. . .
— Lauren Winner
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.
— Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
The space that I can call mine, that isn't full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
People who live entirely by the fertility of their imaginations are fascinating, brilliant and often charming, but they should be sat next to at dinner parties, not lived with.
— Scottie Fitzgerald Smith
... consider the meaning of these images. Every time you're working with them, ask yourself: what do they mean? And, even more important, what do they mean to me? The more specific and personal something is, the more its universality emerges.
— Fiona Wood, Cloudwish
If an artist wants to be original, he should not look to art for inspiration, for art seeks its model in life, not art—and only life is rich enough to simulate originality.
— Anthony Marais
Nobody, not even artists, understood art. What speed has to do with it. How much work it takes, year after year, building the skills, the trust in the process, more work probably than any Olympic athlete ever puts in because it is twenty-four hours a day, even in dreams, and then when the skills and the trust are in place, the best work usually takes the least effort. Usually, it comes fast, it comes without thought, it comes like a horse running you over at night. But. Even if people understand this, they don't understand that sometimes it is not like that at all. Because the process has always been: craft, years and years; then faith; then letting go. But now, sometimes the best work is agony. Pieces put together, torn apart, rebuilt. Doubt in everything that has been learned, terrible crisis of faith, the faith that allowed it all to work. Oh God. And even then, through this, if you survive the halting pace and the fever, sometimes you make the best work you have ever made. That is the part none of us understand.
— Peter Heller
What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren't feigned, nor did they derive, I'm convinced, from any perceived send of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here's the thing about my father that I've come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn't the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in "Do unto Others." It was a good, indeed golden, rule to by and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn't enough. "You ain't gotta love people," I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey's back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good then they're down because maybe tomorrow you'll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expects that of you, asny more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother's response when he repeated over dinner what he'd told the men at the store. "Really, Lou? Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to do? Love people? Isn't that what the Bible says?
— Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs
Morning birdsong filled the room. For all his high opinion of birds, privileged among God's creatures, still, deep in his heart, the Emperor did not trust them, just as he did not trust artists.
— Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
Artists could never, would never, harm anybody. They’re too busy painting. Same with ad drunks. They might be a bit useless at functional tasks, they may break things (small objects, precious objects, door handles, car accessories, and such), but they’re too pissed to get seriously involved in anything.
— Andrew     Miller, Dub Steps
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.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
A Photographer is limited to some types of Photography. An Artist is able to do any types of photography. It's just a matter of choice and feelings.
— Steeven Shaw
Flying is not only the art of the birds, but it is also the art of the artists!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. Thee is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and so dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Philosophers tell you what they think. Artists show you.
— Marty Rubin
How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?
— Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.
— E.H. Gombrich
I must not undervalue my work simply because I enjoy it. A working artist understands his worth and lives by it.
— Mary Robinette Kowal, Of Noble Family
Artists and intellectuals are not he same animal. This causes a great deal of confusion. Our schools teach educate us intellectually but not artistically. We learn to deconstruct art, not construct it.
— Julia Cameron
When I looked upon the surface of the gently flowing water, each painting that I had burned upon joining the church rose from the waves. I tried to grab them, but they dissolved upon touch.
— William Poe, Simon Says
There is no difference between being an artist and being in love.
— Marty Rubin
How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?""Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. ...
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The honest artist answers, “I steal them.
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
The painter knew the mirror lied. And the canvas told the truth.
— Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Waking Up at Rembrandt's
There are no greater or lesser arts, only greater or lesser artists.
— Jim Malone
When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.
— Peter Coyote, The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education
If you wish to make good art, then you must believe you already do. Otherwise, you will never be good enough.
— Luhraw
Before, I could only guess of who I was. Now, thanks to my art, I know who I am
— Luhraw
Know everything. Say nothing.
— Luhraw
. . . there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
He never looks you straight in the eye; or if he does, it is somehow vaguely, indefinitely; he does not pierce you with the hawk's eye or the falcon's gaze of a cavalry officer. The reason for that is that he sees, at one and the same time, both your features and those of some plaster Hercules standing in his room, or else he imagines a painting of his own that he still means to produce. That is why his responses are often incoherent, not to the point, and the muddle of things in his head increases his timidity all the more.
— Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Such meeting reveal that which we all darkly suspect about those whose art we have loved: that they are unlikely to be whatever it is we imagine them to be.
— Morrissey
Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about.
— Henry Ford
He was already beginning, as always happens at a respectable age, to take a firm stand for Raphael and the old masters––not because he was fully convinced of their lofty merit, but so as to shove them in the faces of young artists.
— Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Before, I could only guess oh who I was. Now, thanks to my art, I know who I am.
— Luhraw
Diversity matters. Not only in what we look like, or what religion we practice, or in whom we love, but also in how we live our lives, including the order in which we go about things, the seasons in which we are able to create art. Those who are engaged in the arts should be the last to send any other message, because when artists endorse the traditional order of a society, it suggests that they have forgotten their own true role within it.
— Robin    Black
Daniel's desk by the window is piled high with his drawings. The artwork is everything. He thinks of himself as the act of drawing. His body of work is his life, it is his continuity. The drawings show outwardly that inner place where he is still alive, a thread to connect him with the world.
— J.J. Brown, American Dream
They'd lived their lives on tightropes, never knowing where the next paycheck was coming from or if one was coming at all, their personal lives a mishmash of backstage affairs and dressing room brawls endured for the brief heady adrenaline rush brought by the orchestra's overture and glare of white lights.
— Michael  Callahan, Searching for Grace Kelly
We are the next we.
— Shawn Lukas
Thanks to my art, I now know who I am.
— Luhraw
Abstract is a journey through both my mind and my past.
— Luhraw
We are the next us.
— Shawn Lukas
The suprematist must have a superior knowledge of understanding. With out that, their art is powerless
— Luhraw
There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.
— Guy Mankowski, How I Left the National Grid: A post-punk novel
I think that what most artists are trying to do is trying to understand. I think what distinguishes creative people and/or artists from another type of person is perhaps a willingness to go headlong into that uncertainty.
— Brandon Boyd
I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation.The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The sharp fragments of life, sharp, complete moments. Such are women. They have lovers.Each of these thirty-three (or how many of them were there?) had painted his mistress. Excellent! I grew used to myself being in their presence.Thirty-three mistresses! Thirty-three mistresses!And I was all of them and yet all were not me.I studied the abomination for a long while: before I modeled for them, as well as afterwards.I modelled in order to study. This I felt so keenly. It seemed to me that I was learning about life by pieces, by separate pieces, fragments, but every fragment possessed all its own complexity and power.The abominations began to divide in half. With every day this became clearer. One half became mistresses and the other half queens.Each of the thirty-three created his mistress or his queen.("Thirty Three Abominations")
— Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his [sic!] time but most people are far behind theirs.
— Edgard Varèse
Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called "artist's world.
— Muse
He's been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he's come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he's an art bum...
— Richard Yates
There is a LOT of bad news every day. The world seems to be getting more and more crazy. So every time you see some bad news, go do something nice for someone or go create something. Write a poem or a song, draw or paint a picture, do something nice for a stranger, even something as simple as complimenting a stranger's outfit or doling out extra smiles during your day. We have to balance out the evil of the world somehow. As artists we are most well equipped to do so!
— Marcy Ferro
He said, "Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie.
— Russell Banks
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.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
Artist colonies are notorious for breaking up marriages and housing affairs.
— Kerry Cohen, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity
Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake
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?
— Peter Heller, The Painter
The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.
— Gustave Flaubert
The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What wedo with them...I think that’s what makes us artists.
— Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light
I found that those friends of mine who welcomed the unseen into the realm of their seen offered immediate understanding. Some are Christians, some are not. Most are artists of some kind or other; artistry can extend to a way of being, of living lovingly in this world. Many seem to have almost a spiritual affinity for the unmarked trail, armed only with True North. ["Leap With Faith" Blogpost By Carolyn Weber — July 27, 2011]
— Carolyn Weber
So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative...art, if you like, is really a lack of alternatives."-Jonathan Meese
— Prestel Publishing, Jonathan Meese: Fraulein Atlantis
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.
— Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
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.
— Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.
— Roma Tearne, Mosquito
I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
— Vincent van Gogh
Cherish your own emotions and never under-value them. We are not here to do what has already been done.
— Robert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art
When I compare myself to the other fellows there is something stiff and awkward about me
—  I look as if I had been in prison for ten years.
Artist Matthew Barney has made a film about “shit”. It is hardly original. Hollywood has made shit films for decades.
— Dean Cavanagh
Don't listen to the politicians, always look at the artists, they're the first to tell us where we're going.
— Mark Mills, The Savage Garden
Girls do go for the finely-chiselled. And apart from his looks, he's and artist, and there's something about artists that seems to act on the other sex like catnip on cats.
— P.G. Wodehouse
Artists shows us what we blind to.
— Baris Gencel
It's hard to explain your passions, but sometimes it is harder to live them.
— Michael Lee West, She Flew the Coop: A Novel Concerning Life, Death, Sex and Recipes in Limoges, Louisiana
I wonder if only artists can feel peace like this—such a gentle, inconspicuous peace that an ordinary person might not even notice.
— Tessa Emily Hall, Purple Moon
Some one has defined a work of art as a “thing beautifully done.” I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word “done,” and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.
— Robert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art
Art does what reality cannot.
— Jayme K.
And in uttering thatExcellently executed truthYou become an artist too
— Maddy Kobar, The Songs of The Gullible Wiseman: The Early Poems of Maddy Kobar, 2008-2013
Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.
— Annette Messager
We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.
— Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
We [artists] aren't people, not the way most people are. We're just...carriers. Little boats bringing goods from foreign lands.
— Sam Starbuck, The Dead Isle
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
— Georgia O'Keeffe
That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.
— Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion
I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.
— Lisa Mangum
The first thousand are the hardest.
— Herbert Gute
Don't separate 'real' life from 'creative' life.
— Patti Digh, Creative Is a Verb: If You're Alive, You're Creative
Good artists copy
—  great artists steal.
Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.
— Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love
In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.
— Stephen Colbert
Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.
— Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work
That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.
— Amy Reed, Crazy
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.
— Jonathan Culver
I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.
— Jane Yolen
I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice in life.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. "So why wouldn't you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed?
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.
— Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer
Artists are dishonest creatures really. They foist their version of reality upon us while making it all up. Writers, painters, musicians, auteurs—they’re all the same.
— Tom Gething from "Sabotage"
Real artist cannot be blackmailed. I suspect they've been confessing shit all their life.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
I do believe most curators - maybe I'm only speaking for myself here - want to be artists on some level. Curators must have an innate interest in what an artist makes. And they certainly have their opinions and criticisms, and the always ask, "How would I have made this, or how would another artist make this?
— Stroud Marion Boulton
He was the most astonishing contradiction of components I’d ever encountered. Shy yet fiercely communicative when putting an idea into your head. Vocally astringent regarding his own abilities but not to the point that he couldn’t produce—he was as prolific an artist (yes, an artist, and I never use the term, especially regarding people I like) I’ve ever seen. But I could feel it. Everything he sketched, penciled, inked, made—was a payment, one he could scarcely afford; as if it physically hurt him to put pencil to paper. Yet that only seemed to spur him on, to live far beyond his means. He was unable not to. For Sketch, to draw was to breath, and so the air became lead—silvery in the right light, dark soot in the wrong; heavy, slick and malleable—into shapes he brought together in glorious orchestration, with a child’s eye and a rocket scientist’s precision, all fortified by a furious melancholy, a quiet engine of sourceless shame and humility.When it came to another’s work, he longed to praise it but then couldn’t resist critiquing it all within an inch of its life, analyzing deficiencies with uncontrollable abandon and laser accuracy. He was sharp as his Radio 914 pen nibs, and as pointed.And then he’d apologize. Oh, he would apologize: Oh my GOD, forgive me, please don’t hate me, I’m SORRY, don’t listen to me, why am I saying things, what do I know, I don’t know anything, why do you listen to me you should just tell me to shut UP, I’m awful, forgive me, you hate me, don’t you? Tell the truth. Please don’t hate me. Please don’t. Please.
— Chip Kidd, The Learners
People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
— Carson McCullers, The Square Root of Wonderful
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing
— William Saroyan, My Heart's in the Highlands
She watched as he settled down on the bed with Naya skin to skin on his chest. His hand all but covered her tiny body as he stroked her in that changeling way, bonding with her on the most elemental level. Then he purred, and Naya made a happy little sound of delight, very much a cat in her love of touch.
— Nalini Singh, Kiss of Snow
I want to care, but I don’t. I look at you and all I feel is tired.
— Elizabeth Scott, Miracle
...I think that people who make judgements about other people they don't even know are shallow, and people who start rumors are shallow, and I really don't care what shallow people say about me.
— Nina LaCour, Hold Still
My friend, you had horses, and deed of arms, and the free fields; but she, being born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.-Gandalf to Eomer, of Eowyn
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
One is not loved accidentally; one’s own power to love produces love - just as being interested makes one interesting. People are concerned with the question of whether they are attractive while they forget that the essence of attractiveness is their own capacity to love. To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical existence but for the growth and development of all his human powers. To love productively is incompatible with being passive, with being an onlooker at the loved person’s life; it implies labor and care and the responsibility for his growth.
— Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics
Sincerity increases willingness to care.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.
— Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains
The fact that you don't hate him for this breaks my heart. And if we weren't leaving because of what they'd done to you, we'd be leaving because the pack has twisted you enough to make you think that it's okay for someone to treat you that way.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Raised by Wolves
One of the most liberating notions is learning how many truly do not care about you, and moreover, how the few who do care about you, marvel at your indifference.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Promise me, man. If anything ever happens to me, promise me you'll take care ofAngelina. She's something special, Micah. Heart way too big for her own good. I worrybecause she doesn't see everyone for who they are. She's too busy looking for the good.I've tried to get her to adopt some cynicism, but the truth of the matter is, she wouldn't bethe same girl if she did.
— Maya Banks, Sweet Temptation
After fight club you're so relaxed, you just cannot care.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Sometimes we care others more than they deserve!
— Rupesh Sreeraman
I tend the wounded,/and in the tending, wound./Sometimes truly seeing another/is lethal./Loving fully, a bayonet.
— Em Claire, Silent, Sacred, Holy, Deepening Heart
Isn’t this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?
— Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
True leadership is caring about the people who don’t care about things you care about.
— Richie Norton
Minutes remain the same length whether they are held against the span of years or minutes themselves. Yet, when minutes are held against themselves, they seem so terribly brief. Therefore, we’d be wise to celebrate life before minutes are all that’s left.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving, caring souls. How many people can say that?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
The care of your body is one of the most important investments you can make. What good are expensive clothes, cars, and clutter when your body is sick from neglect? No purchase is worth more than the value of your wellness. Think about your priorities. Is an hour of browsing social media worth more than an hour of strolling peacefully through nature? Is having an unhealthy meal out worth more than eating a healthy home cooked meal? You choose what abuse and neglect to your body is worth it. You can choose to think that love for your life and your well being are worth more than anything else.
— Avina Celeste
Alone we come and alone we leave. Verily! Love and care is just a pretence.
— Faizan Ahmad Zargar
I am sorry, you mistook my disinterest for attention. I don´t care.
— Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
The only thing I care about beside my parent is you.#indrani(wifey)
— Abesh Das
Someone tried to kill me, and I’m going swimming. I’m going swimming, because it doesn’t matter. I’m going swimming, because I don’t matter. I’m going swimming, because that’s what Claires do. We swim and we daydream and we read and we wait for someone to care, and they never, ever, ever do.
— Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Nobody
I cared for you more that you cared yourself. Something which I regret for you didn't deserve to be cared!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Aside from all that, she was carrying about a million tons of titanium ore to the heavy industries on Gorda. All told, that would take care of their traveling arrangements for the next year or so, pretty much.
— Christina Engela, Black Sunrise
Strangers don't harm you ,But the people who says they care about you.
— Mohammed Zaki Ansari, "Zaki's Gift Of Love"
That dot is special. That dot is where LIFE lives. And I get it, it's biased of a living organism (like me) to think that life is important and special, but I don't care!Because stars don't care, galaxies don't care, but people do. Undoubtedly we're something special because, as far as we can tell, we are unique.
— Charlie McDonnell, Fun Science: A Guide to Life, the Universe and Why Science Is So Awesome
If you think somebody cares...Where are you?How are you?...(You are fucking... damn...WRONG)
— Deyth Banger, Care
I don’t want you involved in any of that.”“Because you care about me?”“Of course.” I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t want to worry about you getting hurt.”He stepped in and his other hand settled just above my hip. “Because you want to be with me?”“Yes.” That word was easy to speak.Rider smiled then and the right dimple appeared. “You want to be my girlfriend.”I opened my mouth and then I laughed. It sounded strange after the seriousness of our conversation, but the statement was sweet and silly.His cheeks pinked. “Not sure how I feel about that laugh,” he teased. “But I do love the sound of it.”My breath caught at the word. Love. Oh, gosh, was that what was happening here?“So do you? Want to be my girlfriend?” he asked, and then chuckled. “Probably should’ve brought this up before I kissed you, but I want...I want to see where this goes, Mallory. I feel like we got a second chance, you know? I’ve been thinking that since I sat down in speech and saw you sitting there. We have a second chance. And who gets second chances?”I searched his gaze, feeling a rightness deep in my chest. I had thought the same thing before, about second chances.“I don’t want to pass that up.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, The Problem with Forever
Infatuation -You easily back off. Love -You silently care, no matter what..!!
— Akansh Malik