Art Quotes

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

My friends, your people have both intellect and heart; you use these to consider in what way you can do the best to live.

Spotted Tail (Sioux Indian)

Speak the truth, do not yield to anger give, if thou art asked for little by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods.

The Dhammapada

Honesty is for the most part, less profitable than dishonesty.

Plato

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

Adam Smith

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

Voltaire

Because women live creatively, they rarely experience the need to depict or write about that which to them is a primary experience and which men know only at a second remove. Women create naturally, men create artificially.

Ashley Montagu

A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

Anonymous

Faced by the mountainous heap of the minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialized dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack.

Steven Runciman

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

Charles Horton Cooley

I? m good enough, I? m smart enough, and dog - Gone it, people like me.

Al Franken, Stuart Smalley in Saturday Night Live, catchphrase

Earth is 98 full. Please delete anyone you can.

Anon.

When the time comes for friends to part, love will be the bride, from heart to heart.

Unknown

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

Uta Hagan

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

Karl Marx

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.

Al Capone

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

Edward Morgan Forste

Did you exchange a walk - On part in a war, for a leading role in a cage?

Pink Floyd, song "Wish You Were Here".

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

Aristotle

The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be...

Antoine Laurent Lavoisie

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because while both parties come prepared to forgive, neither party come prepared to be forgiven.

Charles Williams

How can one conceive of a one party system in a country that has over 200 varieties of cheese.

Charles de Gaulle

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

Andrew Carnegie

The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.

Joyce

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their own peril.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the preface

Give not over thy soul to sorrow; and afflict not thyself in thy own counsel. Gladness of heart is the life of man and the joyfulness of man is length of days.

Ecclesiastes

Are you bored with life Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.

Dale Carnegie

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

George Washington

I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.

Frank Moore Colby

By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with... the earth and the wonders thereof - The sea - The sun.

Katherine Mansfield

It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that eve.

Galileo Galilei

Above all things, be not made an ass to carry the burdens of other men if any friend desire thee to be his surety, give him a part of what thou has to spare if he presses thee further, he is not thy friend at all.

Sir Walter Raleigh

The artist needs no religion beyond his work.

Elbert Hubbard

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.

Hellen Kelle