Mind Of An Artist Quotes

Being an artist:
And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate , I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve to the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed. ~ Virginia Woolf

The mind of an artist never sleeps, because dreaming is when they do their best work. ~ Mark W. Boyer

Every artist lives in his or her work. If you want to understand an artist then look at his or her work! ~ Avijeet Das

[The Creator] shines in the cosmic consciousness as a painting in the mind of an artist. ~ Swami Venkatesananda

Touring the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, astute observer of the young Republic, noted the "feverish ardor" of its citizens to accumulate. Yet, even as the typical American "clutches at everything," the Frenchman wrote, "he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications." However munificent his possessions, the American hungered for more, an obsession that filled him with "anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation."2 ~ Andrew J. Bacevich

I find that an entertainer is quite content to sit still, and I think an artist always has a little motion, always going somewhere. May not know where it is, but there is some sort of unnamed destination. There is some pulling, some movement. So I just found myself in that category according to my own analysis. ~ George Carlin

By the second day, the song lyrics had faded, but in their place came darker irritations. Gradually, I started to become aware of a young man sitting just behind me and to the left. I had noticed him when he first entered the mediation hall, and had felt a flash of annoyance at the time: something about him, especially his beard, had struck me as too calculatedly dishevelled, as if he were trying to make a statement. Now his audible breathing was starting to irritate me, too. It seemed studied, unnatural, somehow theatrical. My irritation slowly intensified - a reaction that struck me as entirely reasonable and proportionate at the time. It was all beginning to feel like a personal attack. How much contempt must the bearded meditator have for me, I seethed silently, deliberately to decide to ruin the serenity of my meditation by behaving so obnoxiously? Experienced retreat-goers, it turns out, have a term for this phenomenon. The call it 'vipassana vendetta'. In the stillness tiny irritations become magnified into full-blown hate campaigns; the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever's available. Being on retreat had temporarily separated me from all the real causes of distress in my life, and so, apparently, I was inventing new ones. As I shuffled to my narrow bed that evening, I was still smarting about the loud-breathing man. I did let go of the vendetta eventually - but only because I'd fallen into an exhausted and dreamless sleep ~ Oliver Burkeman

Remember that an artist's life is an intense search for truth. This search takes many forms. Everyone of these forms demands its own disciplines. I learned and adapted to my search. I expect nothing from you. Question the truth of anything you confront. How does it apply to yourself and the trail you are pursuing? ~ Brice Marden

Scientists say that these things evolved this way over millions of years." He shook his head. "That's a bunch of bunk. I don't think an animal can just all-of-a-sudden decide it wants to make light grow out it's butt. What kind of nonsense is that? Animals don't make light." He pointed to the stars. "God does that. I don't know why or how, but I'm pretty sure it's not chance. It's not some haphazard thing he does in his spare time."
He looked at me, and his expression changed from one of wonder to seriousness, to absolute convicton. "Chase, I don't believe in chance." He held up the jar. "This is not chance, neither are the stars." ... "And neither are you. So, if your mind is telling you that God slipped up and might have made one giant mistake when it comes to you, you remember the firefly's butt. ~ Charles Martin

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday ~ Virginia Woolf

He raised an eyebrow. "Where did you get this? Is our Anne Boleyn suddenly from Mars?" He chuckled. "I always thought she hailed from Wiltshire."
Luce's mind raced to catch up. She was playing Anne Boleyn? She'd never read this play, but Daniel's costume suggested he was playing the king, Henry VIII.
"Mr. Shakespeare-ah,Will-thought it would look good-"
"Oh,Will did?" Daniel smirked, bot believing her at all but seeming not to care. It was strange to feel that she could do or say almost anything and Daniel would still find it charming. "You're a little bit mad, aren't you, Lucinda?"
"I-well-"
He brushed her cheek with the back of his finger. "I adore you."
"I adore you,too." The words tumbled from her mouth,feeling so real and so true after the last few stammering lies. It was like letting out a long-held breath. "I've been thinking, thinking a lot,and I wanted to tell you that-that-"
"Yes?"
"The truth is that what I feel for you is...deeper than adoration." She pressed her hands over his heart. "I trust you. I trust your love. I know how strong it is,and how beautiful." Luce knew that she couldn't come right out and say what she really meant-she was supposed to be a different version of herself,and the other times,when Daniel had figured out who she was, where she'd come from,he'd clammed up immediately and told her to leave. But maybe if she chose her words carefully, Daniel would understand. "It may seem like sometimes I-I forgot wha ~ Lauren Kate

I love games. I honestly can't imagine working with any other medium. I guess it would be akin to an artist who's doing commercial art and then goes into education, but it really frees you up to do all other kinds of creative stuff. ~ Brenda Brathwaite

Since I believe that I have been a devil for many centuries and have risen in rank and been demoted, it could be asked why, with such a history, I still learned a good deal while in Russia. It is because a newly gained sophistication fades once a venture comes to an end. So we develop many new qualities of mind, but soon lose them. ~ Norman Mailer

In the weeks that followed, Elizabeth discovered to her pleasure that she could ask Ian any question about any subject and that he would answer her as fully as she wished. Not once did he ever patronize her when he replied, or fend her off by pointing out that, as a woman, the matter was truly none of her concern-or worse-that the answer would be beyond any female's ability to understand. Elizabeth found his respect for her intelligence enormously flattering-particularly after two astounding discoveries she made about him:
The first occurred three days after their wedding, when they both decided to spend the evening at home, reading.
That night after supper, Ian brought a book he wanted to read from their library-a heavy tome with an incomprehensible title-to the drawing room. Elizabeth brought Pride and Prejudice, which she'd been longing to read since first hearing of the uproar it was causing among the conservative members of the ton. After pressing a kiss on her forehead, Ian sat down in the high-backed chair beside hers. Reaching across the small table between them for her hand, he linked their fingers together, and opened his book. Elizabeth thought it was incredibly cozy to sit, curled up in a chair beside him, her hand held in his, with a book in her lap, and she didn't mind the small inconvenience of turning the pages with one hand.
Soon, she was so engrossed in her book that it was a full half-hour before she noticed how swiftly Ian turned the pages o ~ Judith McNaught

Among wise men there is no place at all left for hatred. For no one except the greatest of fools would hate good men. And there is no reason at all for hating the bad. For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind. And if this is so, since we think of people who are sick in body as deserving sympathy rather than hatred, much more so do they deserve pity rather than blame who suffer an evil more severe than any physical illness. ~ Boethius

The question "Is this an act of self-love or is it an act of self-sabotage?" is
one you must consistently ask yourself if you are committed to having all
that you want and all that you deserve. When you love yourself you feel
worthy and deserving of claiming the gifts of this world. Self-love gives you
peace of mind and balance. Self-love gives you self-respect and the ability
to respect others. It gives you the confidence to stand up and ask for what
you want. Self-love is the main ingredient in a successful, fulfilled life. ~ Debbie Ford

Stone: Yes, we are everything, every experience we've ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don't even began to touch upon it. There's an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.

Interviewer: That's true, just a very small portion.

Stone: Very small. I think that's one of the things that our minds do; they sort out, somehow, often, and make patterns of significant things to us. And I think our minds do that for us in the dark, and then they offer them back in poems. I think your mind makes up your poem before you get it. You know, you receive the poem from your mind, you know you do. It takes a multitude of experiences, and all this language, and all this sound, and puts it together in these patterns that are significant to you and gives it back to you. ~ Ruth Stone

It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons. ~ Freeman Dyson

That Kierkegaard was a stimulating and pioneering force precisely because of his neurosis is not surprising since he started out with a conception of God that had a peculiar Protestant bias which he shares with a great many Protestants. To such people his problems and his grizzling are entirely acceptable because to them it serves the same purpose as it served him, you can settle everything in the study and need not do it in life. Out there things are apt to get unpleasant. Neurosis does not produce art. It is uncreative and inimical to life. It is failure and bungling. But the moderns mistake morbidity for creative birth - part of the general lunacy of our time. It is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic. ~ C.G. Jung

In order that the mind should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can learn to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the good. Hence there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing. ~ Socrates

I didn't know what to do. How do you tell an eight-year-old boy his mother's going to die? I tried. In my own stumbling way I tried to prepare Jim for it. Nowadays, he lives in a world we don't understand too well, the actor's world. We don't see too much of him. But he's a good boy, my Jim. A good boy, and I'm very proud of him. Not easy to understand, no sir. He's not easy to understand. But he's all man, and he'll make his mark. Mind you, my boy will make his mark. ~ James Dean

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers ... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds. ~ Thomas W. Higginson

The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind. ~ William S. Burroughs

I have an image in my mind of what I want, whether it's a light jacket or a one-piece. I can tell if what I want is in the store right away. ~ Marie Kondo

To search for a solutions, knowing that the problem is insoluble; to serve, while smiling at what one serves; to subject oneself to an iron discipline, without end and without profit; to write, in the profound conviction that one's work has no importance; to know, to understand, and to tolerate, while constantly bearing in mind the painful uselessness of being right ... ~ Henry De Montherlant

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles. ~ Igor Stravinsky

Environmental influences also affect dopamine. From animal studies, we know that social stimulation is necessary for the growth of the nerve endings that release dopamine and for the growth of receptors that dopamine needs to bind to in order to do its work. In four-month-old monkeys, major alterations of dopamine and other neurotransmitter systems were found after only six days of separation from their mothers.

"In these experiments," writes Steven Dubovsky, Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of Colorado, "loss of an important attachment appears to lead to less of an important neurotransmitter in the brain. Once these circuits stop functioning normally, it becomes more and more difficult to activate the mind."

A neuroscientific study published in 1998 showed that adult rats whose mothers had given them more licking, grooming and other physical-emotional contact during infancy had more efficient brain circuitry for reducing anxiety, as well as more receptors on nerve cells for the brain's own natural tranquilizing chemicals. In other words, early interactions with the mother shaped the adult rat's neurophysiological capacity to respond to stress.

In another study, newborn animals reared in isolation had reduced dopamine activity in their prefrontal cortex - but not in other areas of the brain. That is, emotional stress particularly affects the chemistry of the prefrontal cortex, the center for selective attention, motiv ~ Gabor Mate

The man journeyed far, and he heard and saw many strange things on his travels. He learned that - that the friend and the enemy are but two faces of the same self. That the path one believes chosen long since, constant and unchangeable, straight and wide, can alter in an instant. Can branch, and twist and lead the traveler to places far beyond his wildest imaginings. That there are mysteries beyond the mind of mortal man, and that to deny their existence is to spend a life of half-consciousness. ~ Juliet Marillier

The Intelligible World within the Divine Mind Compared to a Blueprint within the Architect's Mind

For God, being God, judged in advance that a beautiful copy would never be produced except from a beautiful pattern and that no sense object would be irreproachable that was not modeled after an archetypal and intelligible idea. So when he willed to create this visible world, he first formed the intelligible world, so that he might employ a pattern completely Godlike and incorporeal for the production of the corporeal world, a more recent image of one that was older, which was to comprise as many sensible kinds as there were intelligible ones in the other. ~ Philo Of Alexandria

The concept of an independent spiritual realm does not augment, for me, the magic of the mystical dimension, whereas to think of this dimension as emergent from our minds makes it all the more wondrous to be a human. ~ Ursula Goodenough

Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling. ~ Herbert Read

It is such an agreeable feeling to be busy with something one is only half-competent to do that nobody should criticize the dilettante for taking up an art he will never learn, or blame the artist who leaves the territory of his own art for the pleasure of trying himself in a neighbouring one. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Romantic love is not an emotion ... It's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind. ~ Helen Fisher

My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes. ~ Steve Prefontaine

My heart filled with Nick's smile, with the look of sheer adoration he gave me as he lugged the bucket. In the space of an instant, I felt it again - the crumbling of an old part of me, the growth of something new. The changing of my heart into a mother's heart. It happened at the strangest times, in the most unexpected ways. Nick looked at me, and the love I felt for him was almost painful in its intensity. I'd never known I had it in me, the capacity to love this way ... But when Nick looked at me, my mind tumbled through nights and mornings, seasons and years in the future ... I saw a future like none I'd ever imagined. I wanted it, every minute of it. ~ Lisa Wingate

If you slip or have a minor fall, don't allow yourself an instant's pause. Find your pace again the moment you get up. In your mind take careful note of the circumstances of your fall, but don't let your body linger over what happened. The body constantly tries to draw attention to itself by its shiverings, its breathlessness, its palpitations, its shudders and sweats and cramps; but it reacts quickly to any scorn and indifference in its master. Once it senses that he is not taken in by its jeremiads, once it understands that it will inspire no pity for it that way, then it comes into line and obediently accomplishes its task. ~ Rene Daumal

This victory over excessive religious influence and excessive secularism is often lost in the clatter of contemporary cultural and political strife. Looking back to the Founding is neither an exercise in nostalgia nor an attempt to deify the dead, but a bracing lesson in how to make a diverse nation survive and thrive by cherishing freedom and protecting faith. And faith and freedom are inextricably linked: It is not for priests or pastors or presidents or kings to compel belief, for to do so trespasses on each individual's God-given liberty of mind and heart. If the Lord himself chose not to force obedience from those he created, then who are men to try? There ~ Jon Meacham