Quotes by Artists

It's a strange thing, to be talked about instead of talked to.
Maggie Stiefvater
So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.
Marion Coutts
Maintaining the thinnest facade of a functioning family that tries to act as others do - plan ahead, drive somewhere, go on holiday, relax - is beyond us. We are smashed. Insecurity jams the gears on every action. Each time we are toppled. I feel a fool over and over again for trying.
Marion Coutts
Okay, I know--my superpower--I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know...in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again.
Douglas Coupland
Worshiping someone requires complete passivity. To turn the principle of immobility into a rule.
Unica Zürn
It's all you think about, all you talk about, and all you want us to talk about. What in the world would we call something like that? Oh, yeah! An obsession!
Maggie Stiefvater
Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore—does that ruin the romance?
Julia Cameron
Who ever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
James O'Barr
Being tame is what we're taught: ... put the crayons back, stay in line, don't talk too loud, keep your knees together, nice girls don't...As you might know, nice girls DO, and they like to feel wild and alive. Being tame feels safe, being wild, unsafe. Yet safety is an illusion anyway. We are not in control. No matter how dry and tame and nice we live, we will die. And we will suffer along the way. Living wild is its own reward.
S.A.R.K.
Fear of death is fear of surrender to Infinity. Learn to surrender, to exist at Infinity while alive, and fear of death dissolves. Fear of death is fear of the Unknown. Realize the Wonder, the Eternal Unknowability of the Totality of Existence, and fear of death is transcended. If happiness or freedom depends on the Answer to the Question, then there can be no happiness or freedom. The Question cannot be satisfactorily or finally Answered. For one who abides at Infinity, happy and free, at ease with his Ultimate Ignorance, the Question and the Answer are equally unnecessary. What began will come to an end. What is Wonderful is not threatened. The Process of the Totality of Existence is Transcendental and Eternal. Only a fraction of the Whole can pass away in any moment, since only a fraction of the Whole appears in any moment. Therefore, the Heart Itself is always already Full of Wonder and Love. "I" is the body-mind, the fraction of the Whole that is now appearing and will soon disappear. "I" must be surrendered to the Heart, to the Whole, which is Infinity, Wonder, and Love.
Adi Da Samraj
Only the young die good.
Oliver Herford
To say that my grief will be eternal would be ridiculous - nothing is eternal.
Marie Bashkirtseff
The expectation of an unpleasantness is more terrible than the thing itself.
Marie Bashkirtseff
Every morning I spend fifteen minutes filling my mind full of God and so there's no room left for worry thoughts.
Howard Chandler Christy
I've always believed that one woman's success can only help another woman's success.
Gloria Vanderbilt
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating rejuvenating exciting and satisfying.
Käthe Kollwitz
I believe in my work and in the joy of it. You have to be with the work and the work has to be with you. It absorbs you totally and you absorb it totally.
Louise Nevelson
Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
Kahlil Gibran
Come live in my heart and pay no rent.
Samuel Lover
An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper.
Kahlil Gibran
The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements compassion respect longing patience regret surprise and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love.
Kahlil Gibran
Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries.
Corita Kent
Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.
Corita Kent
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
Georgia O'Keeffe
The biggest thing in today's sorrow is the memory of yesterday's joy.
Kahlil Gibran
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
Kahlil Gibran
In much of your talking thinking is half murdered.
Kahlil Gibran
It is good taste and good taste alone that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
Salvador Dalí
If your ship doesn't come in swim out to it.
Jonathan Winters
You pray in your distress and in your need would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
Kahlil Gibran
The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.
Kahlil Gibran
The simplest things give me ideas.
Joan Miró
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Hans Hofmann
Circumstances are the rulers of the weak they are but the instruments of the wise.
Samuel Lover
We do not make beams from the hollow decaying trunk of the fallen oak. We use the upsoaring tree in the full vigor of its sap.
Sylvia Pankhurst
I long to see everything to know everything to learn everything!
Marie Bashkirtseff
An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.
Louise Bourgeois
In the first grade I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it but I knew the line. ... From the first day in school until the day I graduated everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.
Louise Nevelson
What's important is finding out what works for you.
Henry Moore
You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it could have let yourself go and dug harder.
Emily Carr
You must always be open to your luck. You cannot force it but you can recognize it.
Henry Moore
What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
Louise Nevelson
The really great visual experience today is to fly over a huge city and look down into the night. It's like a tremendous jubilant Christmas tree. You just feel life is worth living - when you come down you may have some doubts.
Gyorgy Kepes
Courage is not afraid to weep and she is not afraid to pray even when she is not sure who she is praying to.
J. Ruth Gendler
Prayer is the voice of faith.
William Van Home
You pray in your distress and in your need would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
Kahlil Gibran
It is not our circumstances that c reate our discontent or contentment. It is us.
Vivian Greene
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
Kahlil Gibran
Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.
Oliver Herford
Every beauty and greatness in this world is created by a single thought or emotion inside a man. Every thing we see today made by past generations was before its appearance a thought in the mind of a man or an impulse in the heart of a woman.
Kahlil Gibran
Cats are angels with fur.
Sark
My favourite example (of ex-patriotism) is James Joyce who left Ireland at nineteen and never came back. But he spent the rest of his life writing about Ireland from the perspective of living in Paris.
Karl Beveridge
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting that I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting than I am then I won't see it.
Ivan Eyre
To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
James McNeill Whistler
I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
Salvador Dalí
Fear has a large shadow but he himself is small.
J. Ruth Gendler
Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
Kahlil Gibran
They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.
Kahlil Gibran
Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O'Keeffe