Art Quotes

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Virginia Woolf

The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret - That man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.

Cicero

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green, Northern Exposure, Burning Down the House, 1992

There is no security on earth there is only opportunity.

Douglas MacArthu

To us, the moment 8: 17 A. M. means something - Something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - Did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

Aldous Huxley

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.

Ulysses S. Grant

No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger that its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise.

Marian Anderson

Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.

Samuel Adams

When you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wiser.

Whittaker Chambers

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.

D. Elton Trueblood

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, I. vii

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

Katherine Mansfield

To get the attention of a large animal, be it an elephant or a bureaucracy, it helps to know what part of it feels pain. Be very sure, though, that you want its full attention.

Kelvin Throop

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten imparting grace.

Plato

Jealousy is the art of injuring ourselves more than others.

Alexandre Dumas

It? s a wonder I haven? t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, July 15, 1944

A high heart ought to bear calamities and not flee them, since in bearing them appears the grandeur of the mind and in fleeing them the cowardice of the heart.

Pietro Aretino

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

Nelson Mandela

Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.

John Tyndall

For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human.

Plutarch, Morals

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

Charles Baudelaire

Blessed be the meek, for they shall inherit six feet of the earth.

The Clown Prince of Darkness, corresponsdence

Living together is an art.

William Pickens

Give all to love obey thy heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thou art all the comfort, The Gods will diet me with.

William Shakespeare

Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, p. 205

Diplomacy is the art of knowing what not to say.

Matthew Trump, in Mother Earth News

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise be wise and thou art happy.

Akhenaton

Let us have a care not to disclose our hearts to those who shut up theirs against us.

Francis Beaumont

Heaven endures and the earth last a long time because they do not live for themselves.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.

Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw".

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

Logan Pearsall Smith

I have witnessed the softening of the hardest of hearts by a simple smile.

Goldie Hawn

He who is outside his door already has a hard part of his journey behind him.

Dutch Prove

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde, A Picture of Dorian Grey - Preface

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self - Complacent is erroneous - - On the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. It is failure that makes people bitter and cruel.

W. Somerset Maugham

Explain it as we may, a martial strain will urge a man into the front rank of battle sooner than an argument, and a fine anthem excite his devotion more certainly than a logical discourse.

Henry Tuckerman