Woman As Art Quotes

Some one has defined a work of art as a "thing beautifully done." I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word "done," and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done. ~ Robert Henri

And what is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of about twenty years in a woman's life, and thirty in a man's? Which years do you mean to include? A woman, I said, at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to the State, and continue to bear them until forty; a man may begin at five-and-twenty, when he has passed the point at which the pulse of life beats quickest, and continue to beget children until he be fifty-five. Certainly, he said, both in men and women those years are the prime of physical as well as of intellectual vigour. Any ~ Plato

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form. ~ Peter Weir

As far as art's concerned, I probably like modern art more than traditional art. ~ Paul McCartney

Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know thee as thou art revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of thy love, amen. ~ Jan Karon

Do everything as if it's the last thing you're ever going to do. And then just let go. ~ Art Hochberg

Then it's decided. In the end, we are just as mortal as man. But while God will save a few, we will corrupt and destroy the rest of them. That is the best way to hurt Him. While many worship what you represent, most will come to believe that the existence of God is a myth."
The woman spoke up. "But if they think He is a myth, won't they think that you don't exist either?"
The Chairman smiled broadly this time.
"Exactly. ~ Glen Robinson

So now, how did God produce this world? ... The fable is that he breathed upon us. In his breath, his wind, came moisture and things began to grow ... a message of hope. Nothing physical. How do you intend for your breath to become a work of art? The only way I can see it is that you prevent your breath from becoming a structure. As soon as your breath takes on the form of a room, you are a carpenter; you're not God. ~ Milton Resnick

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name...
Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her. ~ Ayn Rand

What was it about this woman? This plain, unassuming woman whom he had never before noticed? 'There is nothing about her that is plain or unassuming now.'
And he hated himself for describing her as such.
No... Lady Calpurnia Hartwell was coming into her own in a spectacular way- entirely new and thoroughly different from every woman he had known before her. And it was her heady combination of innocent curiosity and feminine will that had lured him into behaving the way he did.
He wanted her. Viscerally. In a way he'd never wanted any woman before her. ~ Sarah MacLean

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza. ~ Robert Indiana

He was an author whose works were so well known as to be almost confidential. ~ Stanley Walker

Ardent
yet chill and formal,
how I ache
to tempt a chisel
as a sculptor. ~ Hilda Doolittle

I love my local police," Nelson said. "They keep me safe. They look cute in their unforms. I have a great relationship with all the precincts I've ever been in." She said that MARCH seems to be activated in two scenarios: when a venue is in a rapidly gentirfying neighbourhood, or when it gets on some kind of "naughty list" - "sometimes for good reasons, like violence and drugs, and sometimes when, as in the case with art spaces, there's a cultural misunderstanding. ~ Emily Witt

It's very hard as a tall woman to remove your deliberately pronounced feminine aspects and look more masculine. ~ Gwendoline Christie

The people of Ike-no-o used to say that Zenchi Naigu was lucky to be a priest: no woman would ever want to marry a man with a nose like that. Some even claimed it was because of his nose that he had entered the priesthood to begin with. The Naigu himself, however, never felt that he suffered any less over his nose for being a priest. Indeed, his self-esteem was already far too fragile to be affected by such a secondary fact as whether or not he had a wife. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

We will simply say here that, as a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer art. Rubens so understood it, doubtless, when it pleased him to introduce the hideous features of a court dwarf amid his exhibitions of royal magnificence, coronations and splendid ceremonial.
The universal beauty which the ancients solemnly laid upon everything, is not without monotony; the same impression repeated again and again may prove fatiguing at last. Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.
On the other hand, the grotesque seems to be a halting-place, a mean term, a starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a fresher and keener perception. The salamander gives relief to the water-sprite; the gnome heightens the charm of the sylph. ~ Victor Hugo

Why? How had this otherwise sensible woman who had only met Beamabeth as a screaming purple blob fallen under her spell? Or had Beamabeth slipped immaculate into the world, petal-cheeked and smiling amidst gleaming golden curls? ~ Frances Hardinge

The thing about marriage is that it requires so much compromise. And, naturally, someone is going to come into the marriage being better at The Yield. In fact, I say a lengthy marriage requires it. Someone is always going to come in with horns down and nostrils flaring. That requires that the other person run away as quickly as possible while waving the white flag. Certainly not the red flag, because I don't want to be that poor woman who accidentally ran over her spouse sixty-five times. Someone is the bull. Someone must be the china shop. We all have important roles to play. ~ Jen Mann

A woman cannot give a man his sense of maleness. He can desire her, but not identify with her. At best, she can give him a negative identification: I am the opposite of her. This can be very thrilling, but still leaves him deprived of an object of positive identification. (..) other men are brought in to fill the void. They provide contact with an element the inventor, consciously or not, knows he needs to assert himself as fully male. (..) By joining in their sexual games, the woman grants absolution and permission. It isn't so much that these men use women to get to other men as that they need the woman to help break through the guilt barrier that blocks them from their feelings about other men. ~ Nancy Friday

New Jersey Mayor Corey Booker last night personally rescued a woman from a burning building. Or as Fox News reported it, 'black man loots house, steals white woman.' ~ Bill Maher

Marketing is as much art as it is science. ~ Alex Goldfayn

Regardless, you ask why I
did not greet you. Well, let us assume that I had acted as you suggest I
should. Upon your approach, you would have had me gush over you?"
"Naturally."
"You would have me point out how stunning you appear in that gown?"
"I wouldn't complain."
"Mention how your dazzling eyes glisten in the fireworks like burning
embers?"
"That would be nice."
"Expound on how your lips are so perfectly red that they could leave any
man breathless with wonder, yet drive him compose the most brilliant of
poetry each time he recalled the moment?"
"I'd be flattered for certain."
"And you claim you want these reactions from me?"
"I do."
"Well blast it, woman," Lightsong said, picking up his cup. "If I'm
stunned, dazzled, and breathless, then how the hell am I supposed to greet
you? By definition, won't I be struck dumb?"
She laughed. "Well, then, you've obviously found your tongue now."
"Surprisingly, it was in my mouth," he said. "I always forget to check
there. ~ Brandon Sanderson

With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality. ~ Hannah Arendt

You don't have to be age 20 and size zero to be sexually viable or viable as a woman. ~ Belinda Carlisle

Are his letters to Diana downstairs?"
She sighed. "What is it about girls and letters? My husband left me messages in soap on the bathroom mirror. Utterly impermanent.Really wonderful-" She broke off and scowled. I would have thought she looked a little embarrassed, but I didn't think embarrassment was in her repertoire. "Anyway. Most of the correspondence between the Willings is in private collections. He had their letters with him in Paris when he died. In a noble but ultimately misguided act, his attorney sent them to his neice. Who put them all in a ghastly book that she illustrated. Her son sold them to finance the publication of six even more ghastly books of poetry. I trust there is a circle of hell for terrible poets who desecrate art."
"I've seen the poetry books in the library," I told her. "The ones with Edward's paintings on the covers. I couldn't bring myself to read them."
"Smart girl. I suppose worse things have been done, but not many.Of course, there was that god-awful children's television show that made one of his landscapes move.They put kangaroos in it. Kangaroos. In eastern Pennsylvania."
"I've seen that,too," I admitted. I'd hated it. "Hated it.Not quite as much as the still life where Tastykakes replaced one orange with a cupcake, or the portrait of Diana dressed in a Playtex sports bra, but close."
"Oh,God. I try to forget about the bra." Dr. Rothaus shuddered. "Well, I suppose they do far worse to the really famous painters.P ~ Melissa Jensen

The ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. ~ Walter Benjamin

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real - and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself. ~ Gerhard Richter

Once a renowned skirt-chaser, now an exceptionally devoted husband, St. Vincent knew as much about these matters as any man alive. When Cam had asked glumly if a decrease in physical urges was something that naturally occurred as a man approached his thirties, St. Vincent had choked on his drink.
"Good God, no," the viscount had said, coughing slightly as a swallow of brandy seared his throat. They had been in the manager's office of the club, going over account books in the early hours of the morning.
St. Vincent was a handsome man with wheat-colored hair and pale blue eyes. Some claimed he had the most perfect form and features of any man alive. The looks of a saint, the soul of a scoundrel. "If I may ask, what kind of women have you been taking to bed?"
"What do you mean, what kind?" Cam had asked warily.
"Beautiful or plain?"
"Beautiful, I suppose."
"Well, there's your problem," St. Vincent said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Plain women are far more enjoyable. There's no better aphrodisiac than gratitude."
"Yet you married a beautiful woman."
A slow smile had curved St. Vincent's lips. "Wives are a different case altogether. They require a great deal of effort, but the rewards are substantial. I highly recommend wives. Especially one's own."
Cam had stared at his employer with annoyance, reflecting that serious conversation with St. Vincent was often hampered by the viscount's fondness for turning it into an exercise of w ~ Lisa Kleypas

a woman who contributes to the life of mankind by the occupation of motherhood is taking as high a place in the division of human labor as anyone else could take. If she is interested in the lives of her children and is paving the way for them to become fellow men, if she is spreading their interests and training them to cooperate, her work is so valuable that it can never be rightly rewarded. In our own culture the work of a mother is undervalued and often regarded as a not very attractive or estimable occupation. It is paid only indirectly and a woman who makes it her main occupation is generally placed in a position of economic dependence. The success of the family, however, rests equally upon the work of the mother and the work of the father. Whether the mother keeps house or works independently, her work as a mother does not play a lower role than the work of her husband. ~ Alfred Adler

I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief.

In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what?

But Mao's theory might just be the extension o ~ Jung Chang

There are some men who will always prefer to deal with another man, any man, rather than a woman ... I can see him struggling to place me: I'm not married to him, clearly I'm not his mother, I didn't go to school with his sister and I'm sure as hell not going to go to bed with him. So what, he must be asking himself as he chews on his pigeon, is this girl doing here? What is she for? ~ Allison Pearson

I think people have always misinterpreted my self-destructive nature as nihilistic, because if you don't care about the world, you can't create art. I am misanthropic and self-loathing, but never nihilistic. And I think I act far worse off-stage than onstage. ~ Marilyn Manson

As long as art lives never shall I accept that men are truly dead. ~ Giorgio Vasari

True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art's proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise. ~ John Gardner

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood. ~ Freya Stark

If, while I'm painting, I distort or destroy a motif, it is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable. Then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. And that means a process of painting, changing or destroying - for however long it takes - until I think it has improved. And I don't demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so. ~ Gerhard Richter

Cutangle nodded. He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him. Filling his boots with water while adrift on a flooded river at midnight with what he could only describe as a woman seemed about as logical as anything could be in the circumstances. ~ Terry Pratchett

It's so worth-while being a judge, because, if I make good, I can help prove that a woman's place is as much on the bench, in City Council, or in Congress, as in the home. ~ Florence Ellinwood Allen

Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power. ~ Adrienne Rich

There is a difference between dining and eating. Dining is an art. When you eat to get most out of your meal, to please the palate, just as well as to satiate the appetite, that,my friend, is dining. ~ Yuan Mei

As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war. ~ Asne Seierstad