Quotes by Writers - Page 145

It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.
Hermann Bahr
In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.
Dejan Stojanovic
I asked Geertrui the other day what she thought love is-real love, true love. She said that for her real love is observing another person and being observed by another person with complete attention. If she's right, you only have to look at the pictures Rembrandt painted of Titus, and there are quite a lot, to see that they loved each other. Because that is what you're seeing. Complete attention, one of the other..."but in that case," he said, speaking the words as the thought came to him, "all art is love, because all art is about looking closely, isn't it? Looking closely at what's being painted.""The artist looking closely while he paints, the viewer looking closely at what has been painted. I agree. All true art, yes. Painting, Writing-literature-also. I think it is. And bad art is a failure to observe with complete attention. So, you see why I like the history of art. It's the study of how to observe life with complete attention. It's the history of love.
Aidan Chambers
It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.
Liam O'Flaherty
A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
A.S. Byatt
The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Colors are light's suffering and joy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
Giorgio de Chirico
Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.
Dejan Stojanovic
Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have.
Molly Crabapple
It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.
Aldous Huxley
Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)
Benjamin Constant
I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.
o.henry
Although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that "looks like art" and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. Curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. Collectors run in herds to buy work by a handful of fashionable painters. Critics stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so as to "get it right". Originality is not always rewarded, but some people take real risks and innovate, which gives a raison d'être to the rest.
Sarah Thornton
Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.
Rebecca McNutt
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley
The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.
Sarah Thornton
Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
Edmond de Goncourt
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.
Kevin Smith
To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.
Fernando Pessoa
The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.
Orson Welles
Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.
Ossie Davis
Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours - watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.
Herman Melville
A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten', he does not say 'My men were beaten.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Africa PRODUCES what it does NOT CONSUME and CONSUMES what it does NOT PRODUCE.
Ali A. Mazrui
The show became its own little world, with its own internal rhythm and high standards.
Dick Van Dyke
Don't be sad that one day or another you met someone who undermined your capabilities and sapped your energy, what that person did could be the strongest crucible that forged a great leader
Ahmed Elkadi
He listened to their opinions, stated his own, and supported them with reasons; and from his being constantly occupied with such meditations, it resulted, that when in command no complication could ever present itself with which he was not prepared to deal.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... From want of foresight men make changes which relishing well at first do not betray their hidden venom, as I have already observed respecting hectic fever. Nevertheless, the ruler is not truly wise who cannot discern evils before they develop themselves, and this is a faculty given to few.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... Whoever becomes master of a city accustomed to live in freedom and does no destroy it, may reckon on being destroyed by it. For if it should rebel, it can always screen itself under the name of liberty and its ancient laws, which no length of time, nor any benefit conferred will ever cause it to forget; and do what you will, and take what care you may, unless the inhabitants be scattered and dispersed, this name, and the old order of things, will never cease to be remembered...
Niccolò Machiavelli
... If instead of colonies you send troops, the cost is vastly greater, and the whole revenues of the country are spent in guarding it so that the gain becomes a loss, and much deeper offense is given since in shifting the quarters of your soldiers from place to place the whole country suffers hardship, which as all feel, all are made enemies and enemies who remaining, although vanquished, in their own homes, have power to hurt. In every way, therefore, this mode of defense is as disadvantageous as that by colonizing is useful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... I believe that he will prosper most whose mode of acting best adapts itself to the character of the times; and conversely that he will be unprosperous, with whose mode of acting the times do not accord.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The queer thing is that we do trust you," said Bodisham. "In spite of your -- extremism.""You'd better," said Rud with grim conviction. "I'm right. What is extremism? The whole truth and nothing but the truth. I ask you.""It's because of his extremism you trust him," said Chiffan. "It's because in the last resort we believe in his indiscretion, and know he won't fail us even if we fail ourselves. All leadership is extravagance. Extra-vagance. Going a bit ahead."Rud did not quite understand that. "It's because you know I'm right," he said."It's because," said Chiffan, letting his thoughts run away with him," to make a new world, the leader must be a fundamentally destructive man, a recklessly destructive man. He breaks his way through the jungle and we follow...We cannot do without you, Rud.
H.G.Wells
If you're going to lead people, you've got to have somewhere to go.
S.E. Hinton
Humiliation is the only ladder to honoring God's Kingdom.
Andrew Murray
The slaves in Rome were incapable of leisure and so their masters gave them entertainment to keep them pacified.
Oliver DeMille
A bit of adviceGiven to a young Native AmericanAt the time of his initiation:As you go the way of life,You will see a great chasm. Jump.It is not as wide as you think.
Joseph Campbell
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My job was to fight evil, and my soul was my weapon.
Rebecca Chastain
Fine minds are seldom fine souls.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.
Hermes Trismegistus
My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane...
Aldous Huxley
He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer of the Soul.
o.henry
Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face-at least to my taste-his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.
Herman Melville
I am what I am and what I have always been, a poor soul on a journey.
Lian Hearn
Soul - is a bottomless moneybox disappointment.
Musin Almat Zhumabekovich
The soul flies away from the body when God calls back it to the real place that starts life forever, indeed.
Ehsan Sehgal
Have intention, sacred will travel.
S. Kelley Harrell
You need a body to preserve your soul, not a set of abstract principles.
Ahmed Mostafa
I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
Aleksandar Hemon
…for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown
Herman Melville
One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.
Robert Walser
How can I tell anyone that there has always lived within me a rusty sense of disgust-a dull, brackish water that I suspect is my soul?
A.M. Homes
There is no point in getting rich if we lose our soul along the way.
Farahad Zama
My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
Fernando Pessoa
My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.
Fernando Pessoa
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
Fernando Pessoa
The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.
Daniel Defoe