Art Quotes

It often happens that the real tragedies in life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

Oscar wilde, Quoted in Ellmann

I will have no man work for me who has not the capacity to become a partner.

James Cash Penney

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Louis Kronenberge

By nature, men are nearly alike by practice, they get to be wide apart.

Confucius

Keen at the start, but careless at the end.

Cornelius Tacitus

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

Historical reminder Always put Horace before Descartes.

Donald O. Rickte

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine

The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself.

Blaine Lee

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - - For no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self - Love.

William Hazlitt

Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Chief Joseph, on his surrender to Gen. Howard, October 5, 1877

A man of a right spirit is not a man of narrow and private views, but is greatly interested and concerned for the good of the community to which he belongs, and particularly of the city or village in which he resides, and for the true welfare of the society of which he is a member.

Johathan Edwards

Art strives for form, and hopes for beauty.

Rose Elizabeth Bird

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

William Butler Yeats

Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an ailment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

James Madison, Federalist 10

Set priorities for your goals. A major part of successful living lies in the ability to put first things first. Indeed, the reason most major goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first.

Robert J. McKain

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

Christopher Morley

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly combat.

Plato

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Henri Frdric Amiel

Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.

Saint Augustine, The Confessions. Book 1. (The Harvard Classics. 1909? 14, p. 1)

Sticks and stones are hard on bones, aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart.

Phyllis Mcginley

In order to deserve, we must pay our dues and steadily work for perfection. We must relish in struggle, and relinquish pride. We must dispel fear and seek enlightenment. We must shun division and honor love. We must know our hearts and seek to understand others. We must try, live, create, feel, grow and love.

Bryant McGill, Stanford Lectures on Poetry, 1990

All these souls, after they have passed away a thousand years, are summoned by the divine ones in great array, to the lethean river... In this way they become forgetful of the former earthlife, and re - Visit the vaulted realms of the world, willing to return again into living bodies.

Virgil

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

It is the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not to skin it.

Latin Prove

The family - That dear octopus from whese tentacles we never quite escape nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.

Dodie Smith

With reasonable men I will reason with humane men I will plea but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.

William Lloyd Garrison

The way you let your hand rest in mine, my bewitching Sweetheart, fills me with happiness. It is the perfection of confiding love. Everything you do, the little unconscious things in particular, charms me and increases my sense of nearness to you, identification with you, till my heart is full to overflowing.

Woodrow Wilson

A lie travels farther than the truth.

Irish Prove

A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace.

Gersonides

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Tennessee Williams

It? s such a part of me, I assume Everyone can see it.

Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, 02 - 09 - 05

The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.

Berenson

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

Edgar Allan Poe, From a letter to Frederick W. Thomas (February 14, 1849).

I passionately hate the idea of being with it. I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles, 1966

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from luther untill noe that has driven a culture mad. From what occured at linz what huge imago made a psychopathic god. i and the public know what all schoolchildren learn those to whom evil is done do evil in return.

W. H. Auden

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.

Henry David Thoreau