French Art Quotes

What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe,
and of Calypso, and Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and
balms and spices ... It means the economy of your great-grandmother and the
science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It
means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something
nice to eat. ~ John Ruskin

I am certainly not regenerating French art, but am struggling hard to accomplish something on an unlucky piece of paper which has done me no harm at all, and on which, believe me, I am doing nothing that is good ... I hope things will improve eventually; as it is, I am pretty wretched. ~ Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies - loaf givers. ~ John Ruskin

Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century. ~ Terry Teachout

My mission is not to forbid French art. If the quality is there, I buy; if the quality isn't there, I don't. ~ Francois Pinault

The poetical term fête galante refers to a new genre of paintings and drawings that blossomed in the early 18th century during the [French] Regency period (1715-1723) and whose central figure was Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Inspired by images of bucolic merrymaking in the Flemish tradition, Watteau and his followers created a new form, with a certain timelessness, characterised by greater subtlety and nuance.

These depict amorous scenes in settings garlanded with luxuriant vegetation, real or imaginary: idealised dancers, women and shepherds are shown engaged in frivolous pursuits or exchanging confidences. The poetical and fantastical atmospheres that are a mark of his work are accompanied by a quest for elegance and sophistication characteristic of the Rococo movement, which flourished during the Age of Enlightenment, evidenced in his flair for curved lines and light colours.

The flexibility of the fête galante theme proved to be an invitation to experimentation and innovation, and the genre was to inspire several generations of artists, occupying a central place in French art throughout the 18th century. Works by other highly creative painters, such as François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), illustrate their very personal visions of the joys of the fête galante as first imagined by Watteau. ~ Christoph Vogtherr

What separates design from art is that design is meant to be... functional. ~ Cameron Moll

Strategy is the craft of the warrior. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

When I hear the same formula being used over and over, I get bored. Just as huge pop artists have taken inspiration from things that are happening at the moment, I do the same with my music. ~ Katy B

An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates. ~ Jean Lescure

Not one of our political spokespeople - the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser's time - ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go. In the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war whose stated purpose was to topple a specific regime but whose real goal was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli, and American campaign against Gamal Abdel Nasser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a very powerful independent political force. ~ Edward W. Said

Is it acting a true vocation? ... I say it is a gift ... And fame? Neither sought nor expected ... still confounds and amazes and disturbs. Whatever the reason ... I am so very delighted that it did happen ... I would not have missed it for the world ... ~ Ruth Cracknell

God and other artists are always a little obscure ... ~ Oscar Wilde

Unfortunately, fact checking has become a lost art ~ Gary Hopkins

We're making tin gods out of those poor buffoons in Hollywood; I dote on movies and appreciate the scanty art therein but I consider the profession about the most debased and debasing I know. ~ Robert E. Howard

Creativity is not passive, I don't see the creation of art as passive. ~ James Kelman

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy. ~ Clive Bell

All these small ideas that
I am a man or a woman,
Sick or healthy, strong or weak
Or that I hate or love or have little power,
are but hallucinations.

Stand up then!
Know that every thought and word
That weakens you in this world is the only evil that exists.
Stand as a rock; you are the Infinite Spirit.
Say, "I am Existence Absolute,
Bliss Absolute,"
and like a lion breaking its cage,
break your chains and be free forever.

What frightens you, what holds you down:
Only ignorance of your true nature,
of your blessedness; nothing else can bind you.
You are the Pure one, the Ever-Blessed.

Therefore, if you dare, stand on that--
mold your whole life on that.
You are the one with the Eternal Soul.
Know then that thou art He,
and model your whole life accordingly;
for those who know this
and model their lives accordingly,
will no more suffer in darkness. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art. ~ Oscar Wilde

Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius. ~ George Stillman Hillard

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

He turned to Kingsley. "You and what army?"
"I don't need an army."
"What? Are you the French James Bond or something?"
"Of course not. James Bond is vanilla. ~ Tiffany Reisz

There is some pressure when you are a woman doing what I do that you must support all other women unconditionally, no matter what they're projecting, or writing, or producing, or putting forth as their art. I think that's equally arbitrary and random and unfair, and kind of sexist. The secretly sexist way. I have really high standards for what I think is funny. I have that for everything, and I think it would be disingenuous of me to blanket-ly love everything a woman has produced simply to make a statement that we're all in this together. ~ Mindy Kaling

I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites I'm more inclined to think they're selling something more schematic than that
something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat more and eat more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or French fry as it retreats over the horizon. And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full. ~ Michael Pollan

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist. ~ Doris Lessing

The internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high-versus-low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed. ~ Charlotte Cotton

Putting is not an art, it's a dreaded evil. No wise man ever said that. ~ Dan Jenkins

I believe that every human being has mental challenges. ~ Sandra Bullock

It is not the job of art to mirror. Images reflected in a mirror appear to us in reverse. An artist's responsibility is to reveal consciousness; to produce a human document. ~ Squeak Carnwath

What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts. ~ Naum Gabo

I'm going to teach you the art of swordsmanship-or in other words, how to totally kill someone with a sharp, pointy thing. ~ Michael Buckley

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with! ~ Philip Roth

I would like to apologize to Brock Lesnar, his family, the UFC and the UFC fans for my stupid remarks. I respect Brock, all the other fighters, and the sport of mixed martial arts. I'm sorry that I stepped out of line. ~ Frank Mir

There are evidences of a very great art in Europe as long as twenty-five thousand years ago, and in Egypt as far back as sixty thousand years. Money had nothing to to do with the production of these treasures. Money will have nothing to do with the art of the future. ~ Henry Miller

Surviving is a necessity. Living is an art. ~ Cathryn Louis

With him big Phil from Notting Hill an old "face" from the sixties a pin up gangster with a "mars bar" weal scraping his left cheek and of course two "wag" slags in tow trussed up like French Poodles with "Bratz babe" stares and Gucci Handbags ~ Saira Viola

To win the good-will of the people thou governest there are two things, among others, that thou must do; one is to be civil to all (this, however, I told thee before), and the other to take care that food be abundant, for there is nothing that vexes the heart of the poor more than hunger and high prices. Make not many proclamations; but those thou makest take care that they be good ones, and above all that they be observed and carried out; for proclamations that are not observed are the same as if they did not exist; nay, they encourage the idea that the prince who had the wisdom and authority to make them had not the power to enforce them; and laws that threaten and are not enforced come to be like the log, the king of the frogs, that frightened them at first, but that in time they despised and mounted upon. Be a father to virtue and a stepfather to vice. Be not always strict, nor yet always lenient, but observe a mean between these two extremes, for in that is the aim of wisdom. Visit the gaols, the slaughter-houses, and the market-places; for the presence of the governor is of great importance in such places; it comforts the prisoners who are in hopes of a speedy release, it is the bugbear of the butchers who have then to give just weight, and it is the terror of the market-women for the same reason. Let it not be seen that thou art (even if perchance thou art, which I do not believe) covetous, a follower of women, or a glutton; for when the people and those that have deal ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Don't take everything so seriously, especially yourself. It isn't what you think, anyway. ~ Art Hochberg

I was attracted to things that combined art and science equally. I've always been equally interested in art design, science and engineering. ~ Bran Ferren

Thou seest, thou wicked varlet, now, what's come upon thee: thou art to continue, now, thou varlet; thou art to continue. ~ Lorna Sage

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing. ~ Philip Guston

To appreciate art you've got to work at it a bit. ~ Grayson Perry

A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind. ~ Eugene Ionesco

The Greeks had the greatest architectonic gifts. Every art has its climax at some point, and here architecture had its high point. Modeling and painting reached their climax elsewhere. Despite the gigantic pyramids, the most wonderful architecture appears in the Greek temple. ~ Rudolf Steiner

That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general. ~ August Wilhelm Von Schlegel

If the boy who draws
lets you look over his shoulder.
If the poet
smiles
and shows you her words.
If the girl who sings for the shower only,
hums a song
in front of you.
Know that you're no longer a person
but the air
and dust
that fills their lungs.
When the world perishes,
and all things cease to exist,
you'll remain inside an ink stain,
a paint brush,
a song.

Poem N. 8 ~ Alaska Gold

I've had several moments in my career where it seemed like I might not age out of the bracket the world wants to put you in. It's hard to keep growing up inside the performing arts. It's very difficult, and presents a lot of unique challenges. ~ Ethan Hawke

Art is a bad word in Hollywood. You use art too many times and they show you the elevator and then your name is taken off the parking lot. ~ Dennis Hopper