Thoughts On Art Quotes

Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Sergeant Pepper was dead. G.I. Joe lived on. George Bush was president, movies stars were dying from AIDS, kids were smoking crack in the ghettos and the suburbs, Muslims were blowing airliners from the skies, rap music ruled, and nobody cared much about the Movement anymore. It was a dry and dusty thing, like the air in the graves of Hendrix, Joplin, and God. She was letting her thoughts take her into treacherous territory, and the thoughts threatened her smiley face. She stopped thinking about the dead heroes, the burning breed who made the bombs full of roofing nails and planted them in corporate boardrooms and National Guard Armories. She stopped thinking before the awful sadness crushed her.

The sixties were dead. The survivors limped on, growing suits and neckties and potbellies, going bald and telling their children not to listen to that satanic heavy metal. The clock of the Age of Aquarius had turned, hippies and yippies had become preppies and yuppies. The Chicago Seven were old men. The Black Panthers had turned gray. The Grateful Dead were on MTV, and the Airplane had become a Top-40 Starship.

Mary Terror closed her eyes, and thought she heard the noise of wind whistling through the ruins. ~ Robert R. McCammon

The art of sensuality encompassing the exploration and experiencing of all our senses... Those images are being born from and through living the moments of eating favorite chocolate cake with ice-cream, tranquil meditating, walking the beach and feeling the warm breeze on your face and the soothing sand beneath your feet, watching a never repeating its symphony sunset, dancing and feeling your body move through space, smelling flowers in a garden, painting or working with clay, with your fingertips gently touching piano keys or pulling the tense strings of guitar, caressing your ears with the whispers of one's soul, diving into the depth of loving you eyes, and, joining in a passionate kiss of life...the life of the artist... ~ Oksana Rus

I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil's opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn't worry about your paintings anymore. I'm not going to steal them. I don't like them.
Sincerely yours,
P. Soames ~ Mark Helprin

Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you. ~ Jean Cocteau

On my mental instant replay, I realized that obliquely comparing his family to the Nazis was maybe not my finest moment.
He was quiet a second, and then he said, 'Did you know that Hitler anted to be an artist, but since he couldn't get into art school, he turned into a Nazi?'
'Yes, I remember that.'
'Just imagine if he got into art school, the whole world would be different.'
I said, 'It just shows that people should be allowed to be who they are. If they can't, then they turn into nasty, sad people.'
He started to laugh. 'What if you went to the art gallery, and the guy was like, "Here you see a beautiful Monet, and here on your left is an early Hitler." Wouldn't that be weird?'
I couldn't think of any subtle way to turn it back around again.
He said, 'You would go to the gift shop and buy Hitler postcards, and you'd go, "Oh, look at this beautiful Hitler. I'm going to hang it in my room!" And people would wear Hitler t-shirts.'
'Yes,' I said. 'That would have been better. ~ Rebecca Makkai

What you gain here, you lose on the other side. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Punk's influence on music, movies, art, design and fashion is no longer in doubt. It is used as the measurement for what is cool. ~ Malcolm McLaren

You must keep looking on the bright side, because you won't find anything in the dark. ~ Zack W. Van

Express yourself through your art - whether it's your drawings in a sketchpad, tattoos on your skin, the shade of your lipstick, or the clothes that you wear. ~ Kat Von D.

The anger washed away in the knowledge that I was a hypocrite. I don't know how much of it showed on my face, but Jean-Claude cocked his head to one side. "Thoughts are flying across your face, ma petite, but what thoughts?" I stared up at him. "I think I owe you an apology." His eyes widened. "Then this is a truly historic occasion. What are you apologizing for?" I ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant. ~ Joyce Maynard

By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The fault lies with art, not life. Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories – stories that don't dwell so much on the beginning, that don't promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalise our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love. ~ Alain De Botton

What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? ( ... ) To know, really and absolutely know, that there's a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today's Grand Design? (ch. 14) ~ John Le Carre

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on. ~ Gus Van Sant

The art of phlebotomy originated with bloodletting in 1400 B.C., and the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s - and it has not fundamentally evolved since then. You go in, sit down, they put a tourniquet on your arm, stick you with a needle, take these tubes and tubes of blood. ~ Elizabeth Holmes

I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing. ~ Neil Gaiman

I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more. ~ Mary Shelley

Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint. ~ Julian Baggini

We constantly have ideas and experiences that go beyond what we can say or know. Most often these are expressed in art, in painting, in music. Music, everyday confronts us with a form of knowing that doesn't depend on words. ~ Karen Armstrong

I had to get slow and dumb (not take anything for granted) and watch and see how everything connects, how you contact your thoughts and lay them down on paper. ~ Natalie Goldberg

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that "the art of remembering is the art of thinking," he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it's well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine. ~ Nicholas Carr

You don't force him, don't beat him, don't give him orders, because you know that 'soft' is stronger than 'hard', Water stronger than rocks, love stronger than force. Very good, I praise you. But aren't you mistaken in thinking that you wouldn't force him, wouldn't punish him? Don't you shackle him with your love? Don't you make him feel inferior every day, and don't you make it even harder on him with your kindness and patience? Don't you force him, the arrogant and pampered boy, to live in a hut with two old banana-eaters, to whom even rice is a delicacy, whose thoughts can't be his, whose hearts are old and quiet and beats in a different pace than his? Isn't forced, isn't he punished by all this? ~ Hermann Hesse

The presence of excessive wealth puts an unnatural spin on the appreciation of art. ~ Steve Martin

She was this girl living in a bottomless hole of her thoughts.
One day she saw a light. She felt the warmth and walked in its direction.
It was there that she found him.
He spoke to her and wove tendrils of love on her heart.
His compassion was over whelming for her.
His words, his love, his eyes- everything about him was so pure, so true.
Her heart was getting intertwined with the love he was bestowing upon her.
The mesh of affection he weaved around her heart made it breathe. And live.
Vine by vine the mesh thickened.
Today, he is her beloved. They are inseparable.
He smiles, she smiles. They weave dreams.
She loves him beyond infinity.
He has her heart strings. And as he walks, she walks with him. ~ Geetansha Sood

As Christians, we are all engaged in the business of discerning and obeying God's call, and this usually means that soon enough we find ourselves out beyond our own competence, frightened at what God demands and feeling cosmically abandoned, left in the lurch with a job for which our own resources are completely inadequate…Sooner or later, the panic touches each one of us who accepts God's call and heads, eyes wide open, straight into some difficult and mysterious work - like pastoring a church, teaching a class, going back to school, learning a language, creating a work of art. The panic descends on everyone who accepts God's call to do something that engages our heart and wracks our soul - like making a marriage proper through better and worse, raising a child and letting her go into adulthood, enduring a terrible illness, growing up, growing old. In fact, being called out far beyond our own competence is part of our regular experience with God. ~ Ellen F. Davis

Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion,
on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

We live in the midst of an evil world, and see few with us, and many against us. We carry within us a weak heart, too ready at any moment to turn aside from the right way. We have near us, at every moment, a busy devil, watching continually for our halting, and seeking to lead us into temptation. Where shall we turn for comfort? What shall keep faith alive, and preserve us from sinking in despair? There is only one answer. We must look to Jesus. We must think on His almighty power, and His wonders of old time. We must call to mind how He can create food for His people out of nothing, and supply the needs of those who follow Him, even in the wilderness. And as we think these thoughts, we must remember that this Jesus still lives, never changes, and is on our side. ~ J.C. Ryle

The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one's thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren't expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind's eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane. As ~ Ted Chiang

So, I was thinkin' of pickin' up a job as a male stripper . It would be a way to meet women and earn money. Thoughts?" That should refocus his brother if no other way but him pausing to consider it. Quinn had undiagnosed ADHD, Chance was sure of it, and on occasion you had to refocus him. The same worked when Quinn went off on a tangent, you had to flash something bright to get him off the tangent, and in this case, the shiny was Chance becoming a stripper. ~ Alex Morgan

Inside every woman, is a crazy girl. And we all know what I'm talking about. That part of you that is entangled with insecurities, fears, and absolute insanity! The art of femininity lies in the molding, pounding, and defeating of that crazy girl on a daily basis! Look at any woman, and you're looking at a woman fighting a daily battle, wielding her weapons in war, every day! I have said it before and I'll say it again: it is never easy being a woman! And if we could only pound that crazy, insecure girl out of ourselves, it would make such the difference! ~ C. JoyBell C.

I do not know from what associations the hippopotamus got into the chess board, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how WOULD you drag a hippopotamus out of the marsh? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder. After a lengthy consideration I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully to myself: "Well, just let it drown!" And suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared. Went right off the chessboard just as he had come on... of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated. ~ Mikhail Tal

In order to slip from beneath the crushing weight of future thoughts, I adopted a technique of focusing solely on the moment I was living. In itself, removed from the time line that stretched forward and backward from the present, no single moment was that bad. ~ Michael Benanav

Hey, guard!" Ian hollered out loud. "Do you think we could get a bathroom break?"
The guard seemed to snicker as he pointed to the grass outside the cell. Eena smirked at how dead-on her thoughts had been after all.
"Come on," Ian complained. "She can't do that, she's a girl."
The soldier smiled wryly, a shrug communicating his indifference.
Eena laughed in her mind.
(I don't know what you think's so funny. You're the one who's gotta pee.)
Oddly enough, that fact just made her laugh even more. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

She's not like other girls because she's different. I want her kind of different. ~ Melyssa Winchester

Battles are fought in our minds every day. When we begin to feel the battle is just too difficult and want to give up, we must choose to resist negative thoughts and be determined to rise above our problems. We must decide that we're not going to quit. When we're bombarded with doubts and fears, we must take a stand and say: "I'll never give up! God's on my side. He loves me, and He's helping me! I'm going to make it!" ~ Joyce Meyer

Respect but do not fear your own fear. Do not let it come between you and something that might be deeply enjoyable. Remember it is quite normal to be a bit frightened of being alone. Most of us grew up in a social environment that sent out the explicit message that solitude was bad for you: it was bad for your health (especially your mental health) and bad for your 'character' too. Too much of it and you would promptly become weird, psychotic, self-obsessed, very possibly a sexual predator and rather literally a wanker. Mental (and even physical) well-being, along with virtue, depends, in this model, on being a good mixer, a team-player, and having high self-esteem, plus regular, uninhibited, simultaneous orgasms with one partner (at a time).
Actually, of course, it is never this straightforward because at the same time as pursuing this 'extrovert ideal', society gives out an opposite - though more subterranean - message. Most people would still rather be described as sensitive, spiritual, reflective, having rich inner lives and being good listeners, than the more extroverted opposites. I think we still admire the life of the intellectual over that of the salesman; of the composer over the performer (which is why pop stars constantly stress that they write their own songs); of the craftsman over the politician; of the solo adventurer over the package tourist. People continue to believe, in the fact of so much evidence - films, for example - that Great Art can only be pr ~ Sara Maitland

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the 'moved' character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it's communication. ~ William L. Stull

The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. ~ Alfred Stieglitz

Besides, even if I blocked my thoughts, my eyes would give me away. It was easy to put on a brave face but the eyes were essentially the window to the soul.
Your eyes would always betray you; no wonder people avoided eye contact when they had something to hide. The eyes couldn't fake emotions – surprise, happiness, betrayal, remorse. The list went on and on. Mine were probably screaming anticipation with a hint of irritation. ~ Shawnda Currie

I think there's a danger with any great art, that if you begin to test your ideas on other people, and get their opinions before making decisions, or if you pay too much attention to what other people say about what you create, that it really pollutes your expression. I think that I'm much more about pure art and honesty and expressing exactly what I feel, and not caring so much what anyone says. However, I do respect, and I do pay attention to everyone's comments. And I do take them into consideration. But I don't base my decisions by it ~ Marilyn Manson

Buddhist say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientist confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you've been programmed to fear death, that particular pathway isn't set in stone. Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating mental circuits. ~ Caitlin Doughty

Bantam has an incredible team working on my books, and I'm so thrilled that the art department is so amazing, since those covers are the 'face' of my stories! ~ Julie Kenner

They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art. ~ Robin Leach

I love to speak to five people at the same time and make them pay attention to me while not allowing them to say a word. I answer them before they have a chance to speak. They then change their thoughts and I do it again. They feel both frustrated and hooked to the conversation. I feel both entertained and amused at their disbelief on what is occurring before their eyes. They cannot see that I'm communicating in three ways at the same time, while they're focused in one. And they think I'm smart because I talk too fast, while the truth is that they are not intelligent because they cannot see the obvious in front of their eyes. ~ Robin Sacredfire

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection. ~ Alain Badiou

Living with kids is like living with a bunch of drunks. You know you really have to be on your toes all the time. Things are falling over and breaking and spilling. If you live on the second story, you really have to keep the windows shut all the time. ~ Tom Waits

Warning: This read will cause lack of sleep! You wont want to put it down!

July 13, 2016 by Francine Baia
This was a long awaited novel in the Sword of the God series and it was most definitely well worth the wait. The author provides an all encompassing look into the inner thoughts and machinations of each character which is commanding. She tackles several serious subjects that are current in today's society, including PTSD and how it affects people differently and the devastation it causes on family. Several love stories are explored which keeps the readers on edge and wanting more. The integration of languages and cultures are seamless and readily understandable which bolsters the depth of the multiple storylines and at times is masterfully interlaced with comic relief. This is truly an enjoyable read that you will find difficult to put down. Anxiously anticipating the next installment! ~ Anna Erishkigal