Art Quotes

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

George Santayana

What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step toward truth.

Denis Diderot

Farmers are the only indispensable people on the face of the earth.

Ambassador Li Zhaoxing, PRC, Idaho Grain, Fall 2000, p. 8

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.

Edmund Burke

The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized, vilified, and misunderstood. That is part of the penalty for greatness, and every great man understands it; and understands, too, that it is no proof of greatness. The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure continously without resentment.

Elbert Hubbard

Hallow the body as a temple to comeliness and sanctify the heart as a sacrifice to love love recompenses the adorers.

Kahlil Gibran

If someone is going to kill me, they are going to kill me. - - John F. Kennedy to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 1962.

John F. Kennedy, "A Thousand Days, " by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr [1965]

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

Dan Quayle

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

J. Russel Lynes

Promptitude is not only a duty, but is also a part of good manners; it is favorable to fortune, reputation, influence, and usefulness; a little attention and energy will form the habit, so as to make it easy and delightful.

Charles Simmons

Martyrdom... is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

George Bernard Shaw

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.

Nietzsche

Man is a make - Believe animal - He is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

William Hazlitt

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.

Martin Luthe

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

W. Somerset Maugham

Whatever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy heart.

Jesus Christ

Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginning.

Robert Collie

A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

Jim Bishop

Lactomangulation, n.: Manhandling the open here spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the illegal side.

Rich Hall, "Sniglets".

The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.

Mignon McLaughlin

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.

Lou Dorfsman

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.

Sir Ralph Richardson, quoted in New York Herald Tribune, May 19, 1946

A wisely chosen illustration is almost essential to fasten the truth upon the ordinary mind, and no teacher can afford to neglect this part of his preparation.

Howard Crosby

I was resolved to sustain and preserve in my college the bite of the mind, the chance to stand face to face with truth, the good life lived in a small, various, highly articulate and democratic society.

Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve

The earth has grown old with its burden of care But at Christmas it always is young, The heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair And its soul full of music breaks the air, When the song of angels is sung.

Phillips Brooks

Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

Lytton Strachey, in Michael Holroyd Lytton, Strachey vol. 1 (1967)

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Marcel Proust

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes, Wasps, 422 B. C.

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

Charles Baudelaire

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.

Juvenal, Satires

If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded and has a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

Thomas Wolfe

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

John Adams

While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual, and the sublime are today suspect, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.

Ian Hornak, Cover Magazine, 1994; American Idealist & Realist Painter and Draughtsman recognized for his collaboration with the

Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.

Seneca, Epistulae Morales