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Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.Rainbow Rowell
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It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.Vincent Van Gogh
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Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.Clive Barker
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Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.Chuck Klosterman
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There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.Vincent Van Gogh
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There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.Coco Chanel
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Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.Erich Fromm
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Everything you can imagine is real.Pablo Picasso
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A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.George Bernard Shaw
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If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.Unknown
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Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.Woody Allen
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Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?John Keats
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Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is..and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be..and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart..no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them. .Robert A. Heinlein
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Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.Oscar Wilde
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Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art Bullfighting can be an art Boxing can be an art Loving can be an art Opening a can of sardines can be an art Not many have style Not many can keep style I have seen dogs with more style than men, although not many dogs have style. Cats have it with abundance. When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style. Or sometimes people give you style Joan of Arc had style John the BaptistJesusSocratesCaesarGarcÃa Lorca.I have met men in jail with style. I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail. Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done. Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water, or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.Charles Bukowski
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Art is the proper task of life.Friedrich Nietzsche
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Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.Criss Jami
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Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.Unknown
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The beautiful is always bizarre.Charles Baudelaire
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Art is to console those who are broken by life.Vincent Van Gogh
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I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.W. Somerset Maugham
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A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.Albert Camus
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.John Irving
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Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.Ani DiFranco
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I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.Carrie Fisher
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Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.Ray Bradbury
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In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.Tom Robbins
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Bring something incomprehensible into the world!Gilles Deleuze
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Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until you play, can't know serendipity unless you risk.Joan Erickson
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I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.Madonna
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Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.Whoopi Goldberg
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I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.Criss Jami
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All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.John Ruskin
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Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else--that's how you'll get ahead.Austin Kleon
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The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living…Dione Lucas
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A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.Henry David Thoreau
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A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.Leonardo Da Vinci
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We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents.Bob Ross
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I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.Frida Kahlo
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Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.Konstantin Stanislavski
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Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy –the joy of being Salvador DalÖ and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalà going to accomplish today?Unknown
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An idea is salvation by imaginationFrank Lloyd Wright
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A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.George Bernard Shaw
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In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?Rainer Maria Rilke
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I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.Georgia OKeeffe
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I shut my eyes in order to see.Paul Gauguin
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I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.Frank Lloyd Wright
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You don't have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.Viggo Mortensen
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Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writersmystics, painters, troubadoursfor they teach us to see the world through different eyes.Jacob Nordby
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The human body is the best work of art.Jess C. Scott
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Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know.Groucho Marx
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Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding. If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. 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.
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I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.Steve Martin
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Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.Banksy
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If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.Jasper Fforde
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An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.Andy Warhol
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The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.Ernest Becker
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The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.Banksy
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The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.Aristotle
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The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possibleWilliam S. Burroughs
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Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.Aristotle
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it diesJohn Fowles
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Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-Langston Hughes
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Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well....Unknown
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I remember growing up, saying you’re an artist it sounds pretentious but now it’s one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself.Marilyn Manson
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To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…William S. Burroughs
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We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.Criss Jami
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Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.Auguste Rodin
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Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw. It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.Owen Barfield
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Using your talent, hobby or profession in a way that makes you contribute with something good to this world is truly the way to go.Simon Zingerman
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I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautifulOscar Wilde
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That is why enemies can be great motivators. They serve as fuel for your fire.Simon Zingerman
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A piece of art comes to life, when we can feel, it is breathing, when it talks to us and starts raising questions. It may dispel biased perceptions; make us recognize ignored fragments and remember forsaken episodes of our life story. Art may sometimes even be nasty and disturbing, if we don’t want to consent to its philosophy or concept, but it might, in the end, perhaps reconcile us with ourselves. ("When is Art?").Erik Pevernagie
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Dreams. They start in your beautiful mind. Think of beautiful things and it will manifest into actions because your body will listen to you. Like it always does.Diana Rose Morcilla
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A spider and a flyi heard a spiderand a fly arguingwait said the flydo not eat mei serve a great purposein the worldyou will have toshow me said the spideri scurry aroundgutters and sewersand garbage canssaid the fly and gatherup the germs oftyphoid influenzaand pneumonia on my feetand wingsthen i carry these germsinto households of menand give them diseasesall the people whohave lived the rightsort of life recoverfrom the diseasesand the old soaks whohave weakened their systemswith liquor and iniquitysuccumb it is my missionto help rid the worldof these wicked personsi am a vessel of righteousnessscattering seeds of justiceand serving the noblest usesit is true said the spiderthat you are moreuseful in a ploddingmaterial sort of waythan i am but i do notserve the utilitarian deitiesi serve the gods of beautylook at the gossamer websi weave they float in the sunlike filaments of songif you get what i meani do not work at anythingi play all the timei am busy with the stuffof enchantment and the materialsof fairyland my workstranscend utilityi am the artista creator and demi godit is ridiculous to supposethat i should be deniedthe food i need in orderto continue to createbeauty i tell youplainly mister fly it is alldamned nonsense for that foodto rear up on its hind legsand say it should not be eatenyou have convinced mesaid the fly say no moreand shutting all his eyeshe prepared himself for dinnerand yet he said i couldhave made out a casefor myself too if i hadhad a better line of talkof course you could said the spiderclutching a sirloin from himbut the end would have beenjust the same if neither ofus had spoken at allboss i am afraid that whatthe spider said is trueand it gives me to thinkfuriously upon the futilityof literaturearchy .Don Marquis
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Am I right in suggesting that ordinary life is a mean between these extremes, that the noble man devotes his material wealth to lofty ends, the advancement of science, or art, or some such true ideal; and that the base man does the opposite by concentrating all his abilities on the amassing of wealth?' Exactly; that is the real distinction between the artist and the bourgeois, or, if you prefer it, between the gentleman and the cad. Money, and the things money can buy, have no value, for there is no question of creation, but only of exchange. Houses, lands, gold, jewels, even existing works of art, may be tossed about from one hand to another; they are so, constantly. But neither you nor I can write a sonnet; and what we have, our appreciation of art, we did not buy. We inherited the germ of it, and we developed it by the sweat of our brows. The possession of money helped us, but only by giving us time and opportunity and the means of travel. Anyhow, the principle is clear; one must sacrifice the lower to the higher, and, as the Greeks did with their oxen, one must fatten and bedeck the lower, so that it may be the worthier offering. .Aleister Crowley
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Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.Aberjhani
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Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.Haruki Murakami
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If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.Unknown
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L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.Charles Baudelaire
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Art is whatever you can get away with.Marshall McLuhan
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The more details, depth and thought you put into your ideas the more valuable they become.Simon Zingerman
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The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement. With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will, he was saved through art, and through art life reclaimed him.Friedrich Nietzsche
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The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.Criss Jami
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Il faut que l’homme s’évade de cette lice ridicule qu’on lui a faite: le prétendu réel actuel avec la perspective d’un réel futur qui ne vaille guère mieux. Chaque minute pleine porte en elle-même la négation de siècles d’histoire boitillante et cassée. Ceux à qui il appartient de faire virevolter ces huit flamboyants au-dessus de nous ne le pourront qu’avec de la sève pure._ Manifestes du surréalisme .Unknown
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The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.Gary Inbinder
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A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.Aberjhani
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The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.Haruki Murakami
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They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts, " he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.Marlena De Blasi
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One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.Susan Neiman
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There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.John Fraser
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Admittedly, art is somewhat like spit. It does not repulse or even worry is while it is still inside of us, but once it exits our body, it becomes disgusting.Ivan Brunetti
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I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?E.a. Bucchianeri
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No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those tools. Likewise, to express ourselves skillfully with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, we need to investigate the most effective ways of using the mind and body since, in the end, they are the only “tools” we truly possess in life. .H. E. Davey
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The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.Peter Kreeft
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When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature, –or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety.Bronowski
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With his night-cap and his night-shirt tatters, He botches up the loop-holes in the structure of the world.Heinrich Heine
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When I draw I don't capture your likeness. I capture your soul.Anthony T. Hincks
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I do not think it possible to convey the moral energy that went into this division between abstraction and realism, from both sides, in those years. It had an almost theological intensity, and in another stage of civilization there would certainly have been burnings at stake.Arthur C. Danto
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Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.Pablo Picasso