Quotes about Art

"It is fully practical to create that which has form in the silence. The noise art makes is usually heard by those whose lives listen to god. It is not adviseable to cheat that which has no other stake than the deeps and brights of all man."

Narcissus lays his head on the grass by the pool, and then he quietly disappears into the underworld, where he continues to gaze at the image in the waters of the river Styx. Our images, especially those that appear in life and play important roles in episodes of transformation, stay with us forever. Once we have entertained an image, it is always potentially present to our gaze. You visit the Uffizi Gallery and see Botticelli's "Primavera," and then for a lifetime you dream of it or you talk about it frequently as a measure of beauty. Unexpectedly it presents itself in a moment of thought or in a discussion, reminding you of its eternal presence. This fragment of the myth suggests that we might continually make soul out of our narcissism by preserving and tending to the images that have come to us throughout our lives. This is the basis of art therapy or journal-keeping: making a home for certain images that have been transforming. Certain photographs or old letters might be related to the pool of water. Culturally, of course, we are constantly invited into the depths of ourselves by the plays, paintings, sculptures, and buildings of past centuries. Art can be a cure for narcissism. The words "curator" and "cure" are essentially the same. By being the curator of our images, we care for our souls.

art  is food for the soul, and an artistic climate is a healthy political climate because it breeds empathy.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight of the soul.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday

life."

Art is my life, Music is my world, Truth is what I live by.

"Artists study the creations of man, Scientists study the creations of God"

Everyone must have a fantasy.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.

I had recently been thinking and writing about the growing fragmentation of the social compact, of whatever it was this country had ever meant when it called itself a democracy: the shredding of the vision of government of the people, by the people, for the people. "We the people - still an excellent phrase," said the prize-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the phrase might someday come to embrace us all. And I had for years been feeling both personal and public grief, fear, hunger and the need to render this, my time, in the language of my art.

Remember that the truth is in the details.  No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details.  Of course the devil's there, too--everyone says so--but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing.  It could be you know.  

Life is not about always being happy -- the art is in being able to feel connected to the Beauty of Life, even when you are sad.  And, if you can express that Beauty, other people can feel connected in a deep and meaningful way.

We can't sing a cardinal's song better than a cardinal. Better just to sing your own song.

...art is something subversive.  It's something that should not be free.  Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order. 

...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic?  Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being.  He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless.  Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. 

...the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given.... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order.... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.

So there's only one tactic for the state:  kill the seers.

Light attracts butterflies and mosquitoes.  Wisdom is knowing the difference.

I close my eyes in order to see.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

My Soul’s Marriage

A commitment to your own and
the world’s transformation.

For the Benefit of myself and All Beings.

I,            (my ego & personality)

Do solemnly swear
to love, honor and obey my soul,
my path to realization  and
relationship with a higher,
deeper creative power,
for better or worse,
for richer or poorer,
in sickness and in health,
from now and forever more.

We are less lonely when we connect. Art is connection.

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way...things I had no words for."

Modern paintings are like women:
You'll never enjoy them, if you try to understand them..

The Iranian Girl

There's a hole in the ground
A moving of earth, now made
A sad depression
Where once she played in
Puddle-rain
Splashing with the joy that comes
From child-like feet

The sound is still here
In the air, the breeze yet carrying
The secret laughter
That haunts the waking hours of those
Who've lost the way

How vain to think that
Memory can be erased

All will remember
No one escapes

I wonder if she saw it
The moment before
Her hair still flying free
The metal catching that last
Pure glint of sun

Did she hear the explosion
That made no sense
Did she feel
Her body come apart
And fall like dust, too soon

Does anyone ask
Whatever she felt, whatever she dreamed
Her dreaming time is gone
And no lofty word of God or
Glory will ever make it right

Dare to listen and you will
Hear her
Dare to open your eyes and see

The Iranian girl
No different
Like you, like me.