Tok Art Quotes

In a sense, all life is a prank. We are not who we appear to be and no one else is as they appear to be. So how can we handle that little mystery? This whole business about God – what's that all about? No one knows anything about that either. So we have people who are not as they appear to be, telling us about something that they have no idea about. We really are on our own here to try and figure it out. That's the real adventure of it. Some people are anxious to tell you what they know and have experienced. I'd rather hear from some people who admit to what they don't know and haven't experienced. They're much more interesting. ~ Art Hochberg

I tell people Baltimore is lucky to be rid of the Colts, they're so lousy, but I don't mean it. ~ Art Donovan

Ah, March! we know thou art Kind-hearted,
spite of ugly looks and threats,
And, out of sight, art nursing April's violets! ~ Helen Hunt Jackson

Civilisation is the art of living in contact with other persons with the minimum of discomfort. ~ Nanamoli Thera

A hen's egg is, quite simply, a work of art, a masterpiece of design and construction with, it has to be said, brilliant packaging! ~ Delia Smith

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

There is no patriotic art. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be a work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate. ~ William Butler Yeats

For me art is a spontaneous journey on the crest of the Tao's wave, ~ David Jay Brown

My life and art have not been separated. They have been together. ~ Eva Hesse

babe, it must be art ~ Bono

Some say art is our highest form of hope ... Perhaps it's our only hope. ~ Roma Tearne

My mind is my canvas; my thoughts are my color and paintbrush. ~ Debasish Mridha

For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me. ~ Morton Feldman

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do. ~ Don DeLillo

I was attracted to a lot of different art forms - dancing, painting. But there's something about music that people hold so close. It's such a powerful art form, and that's why I live for it. ~ Ani DiFranco

When we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn't it rather tragic to find men and women, with brains capable of comprehending the stars and the planets, talking about the weather; men and women, with hands capable of creating works of art, using those hands only for routine tasks; men and women, capable of independent thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for popular ideas; men and women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity; men and women, capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while they babble the confused monotone of the mob? ~ Neil Gaiman

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world. ~ Peter Greenaway

To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! … Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought! ~ Henry Miller

But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses. ~ Steven Weinberg

Both the art of intuition and the science of analytics have the role to play in making wise decisions. ~ Pearl Zhu

You will know what steps to take to move up in your life, what to do when conflict develops, and most important, how to get back on course when you feel yourself slipping. You will find your career advancing to the next level, you will get your most creative juices flowing, you will forever alter the way you raise your children and treat your spouse and give back to your community. And you will do all these things not because you feel you ought to, but because you choose, because you want to, because you're ready to push yourself to the limits of your abilities, to defy the naysayers and ultimately to feel that bone-deep of satisfaction that you lived life to its fullest. ~ Art E. Berg

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. ~ Erich Fromm

One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

Unlike art and sex, money always arouses interest. ~ Mason Cooley

Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Seven years ago, I joined a support group. The loneliness of my Clemlessness - privately, that's what I called it - had become so acute that I could feel it pulling me away, like an undertow, from the people I loved who were still alive. (I angered easily. I wanted to yell at them, "You don't fucking know!" - not just about what they might lose but about anything, everything: politics, art, laundry, taxes. I saw them as not just ignorant but smug, not just naïve but stupid. ~ Julia Glass

The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge. ~ Annie Dillard

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

Oh! Do not excite yourself. Shall I say that he interested me because he was trying to grow a mustache and as yet the result is poor." Poirot stroked his own magnificent mustache tenderly. "It is an art," he murmured, "the growing of the mustache! I have sympathy for all who attempt it. ~ Agatha Christie

Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, 'I am not a crook.' Jimmy Carter says, 'I have lusted after women in my heart.' President Reagan says, 'I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope. ~ Art Buchwald

I enter into conference, and dispute with great liberty and facility, forasmuch as opinion meets in me with a soil very unfit for penetration, and wherein to take any deep root; no propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, though never so contrary to my own; there is no so frivolous and extravagant fancy that does not seem to me suitable to the production of human wit. We, who deprive our judgment of the right of determining, look indifferently upon the diverse opinions, and if we incline not our judgment to them, yet we easily give them the hearing. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Made up of corallitic accretions and painful increments, lit on rare occasions by bolts of revelation, and then stuffed behind the wainscotting to grope in the mouse-turd dust, art is the equivalent of athlete's foot, at best an exquisite itch, at worst an excuse to stop walking. On the emotional side, it is either masturbation with a hockey glove or a night beneath the sliding moon that shames Eros. ~ Harold Town

Sorrow is humbling. I want my pain to be fabulous. I don't need my pain to be worse than anyone else's; I just want it to be strangely, uniquely mine. Art to someone else's breakdown.
- Thea Hillman, "Dear Kath After"
from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache ~ Clint Catalyst

I'm glad I am crazy, it keeps me trying. I despise trendies, I know they're lying. ~ Iggy Pop

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" - to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a sainte-terrer", a saunterer - a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit (1) in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books. ~ Jerry Saltz

What do you want art to give you? What do you want cultural experience to give you? Shouldn't it be in-depth, profound experiences which have some satisfaction and can be retained in your four senses and your imagination for the rest of your life? ~ Peter Greenaway