quotes…

Joseph Addison
Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.

Berthold Brecht
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

James Baldwin
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers.

William Blake
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Johannes Brahms
Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration.

The Buddha
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we create the world. ~ The Dammapada

C.K. Chesterton
Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art … There must always be a rich moral soil for any artistic growth.

Chinese Proverb
Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.

Leonard Cohen
Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
~Strange Music

Confucius to a pupil
Do you think I have come to know many things by studying them? No. I penetrate them by their underlying unity.”(15:3)

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their jobs done. ~ Peter Drucker
Leonardo da Vinci
Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art .

Antoine de St. Exupery
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Lawrence Durrel, author

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?

Bob Dylan
In writing songs I’ve learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

Albert Einstein
When the solution is simple, God is answering.

Jean-Luc Godard
Sometimes reality is too complex. Fiction gives it form.

Paul Gauguin
Many excellent cooks are spoiled by going into the arts

Nadine Gordimer South African novelist
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity
—The Essential Gesture, lecture, 12 Oct 1984.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldy cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Vaclav Havel
The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul.

I Ching
When the way comes to an end, then change – having changed, you pass through.

Sophia Loren (1934 – ____) Italian actress
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
When I am…completely myself, entirely alone…or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these come I know not nor can I force them…Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them gleich alles zusammen [at the same time all together.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination, nor both together, go to the making of a genius. Love, love, love: that is the soul of genius.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The essence of all beautiful art , all great art , is gratitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche
We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Georgia O’keeffe
To create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.

Marcel Proust
I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been – if the invention of language had not intervened — the means of communication between souls. (Remembrance of Things Past)

Albert Schweitzer
In everyone’s life at some time,
our inner fire goes out.
It is then burst into flame by an encounter
with another human being.
We should all be thankful for those people
who rekindle the human spirit.

Rabindranath Tagore
The world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music.

“The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. Art is the transforming experience.” — Joseph Campbell

Scott Adams
Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. — The Dilbert Principle

Saul Bellow
…Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides – the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art , we can’t receive. Proust calls these hints our “true impressions.” The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art , be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing but a “terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.”
—On science and art from his Nobel lecture in 1976

Saul Bellow
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow
I cannot exceed what I see. I am bound, in other words, as the historian is bound by the period he writes about, by the situation I live in. (NYT 4/05)

Saul Bellow
The writer’s art appears to seek a compensation for the hopelessness or meanness of existence. (NYT 4/05)

W. Edward Brown
The artist has one function–to affirm and glorify life.

Berthold Brecht
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

James Baldwin
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers.

Henry Ward Beecher
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Joseph Beuys , 1985
Art that can not shape society and therefore also can not penetrate the heart questions of society, [and] in the end influence the question of capital, is no art .

CAPITAL is at present the work sustaining ability. Money is not an economic value though. The two genuine economic values involve the connection between ability (creativity) and product. That explains the formula presenting the expanded concept of art :ART =CAPITAL.

William Blake
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Georges Braque 1882-1963
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.

Johannes Brahms
Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration.

Julia Cameron
In order to create, we draw from our inner well. This inner well, an artistic reservoir, is ideally like a well stocked fish pond… If we don’t give some attention to upkeep, our well is apt to become depleted, stagnant, or blocked…As artists, we must learn to be self nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them — to restock the trout pond, so to speak.

Marc Chagall
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art .

G.K. Chesterton
Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art … There must always be a rich moral soil for any artistic growth.
Jean Cocteau
Art is science made clear.

Thomas Crum
What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as awork
of art in progress? Imagine that you are a Masterpiece unfolding every second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
How we choose what we do, and how we approach it…will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art

Leonardo da Vinci

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind:
Study the science of art. Study the art of science.
Develop your senses – especially learn how to see.
Realise that everything connects to everything else.

All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art .

Claude Debussy
The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry of a bird leave manifold impression in us. And suddenly, without our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language… I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child.

Antoine de St. Exupery
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Dosteovsky
Beauty will save the world.

Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) French-US artist
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Bob Dylan
In writing songs I’ve learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

Brian Eno
What is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.

Having no silence in music is like having no black or white in a painting.

Sigmund Freud
Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

Gandhi
Live as if you were to die tomorrow;
Learn as if you were to live forever.

Jean-Luc Godard
Sometimes reality is too complex. Fiction gives it form.

Natalie Goldberg , author
The harder you chase something, the faster you go and the less you’re able to let life meet life. If you’re having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down …Creativity exists in the present moment. You can’t find it anywhere else.

Paul Gauguin
Many excellent cooks are spoiled by going into the arts

Nadine Gordimer South African novelist
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity
—The Essential Gesture, lecture, 12 Oct 1984.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldy cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Robert Graves (1895 – 1985) English novelist, poet, writer
Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.

Alex Grey, artist
Artists are like the Phoenix, they periodically have to self-immolate, burn off an aspect of themselves to give birth to something new. The blank canvas demands you exceed yourself. And most times you fail. This pisses you off so bad you want to quit making art or makes some artists want to quit living. But then you calm down and come back to the work. Also, bringing spirit to form calls for an encounter with difficult and resistant materials, the craft and techniques of art . The meditator is unlikely to spill turpentine on themselves in the course of a session on the cushion, but in the fire and alchemy of the studio, you deal with the very frustrating and physical limits of “stuff”. Most artists agree, their dissatisfaction drives them toward something deeper and better, and keeps them making art . Even a “happy” artist like Matisse agreed with this. I think Krishnamurti called it creative discontent.
—alexgrey.net

Alex Grey, artist
Transformative art must express something beyond where you are, it demands that you grow beyond your current self. This is where an artist’s angst and the pain of transformation coincide. You reach toward the true, the good and the beautiful and become a better person through the struggle.
—alexgrey.net

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
The nature of the masterpieces is not to dazzle. Their nature is to persuade, to convince, to enter into us through our pores.

Corita Kent
Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is “to fit together” and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating – whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.”

Paul Klee
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

Sophia Loren (1934 – ____) Italian actress
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.

Kandinsky 1866 – 1944
There is no must in art because art is free.

Rollo May [Artists] love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds. (The Courage to Create)

[I]f you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also, you will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution. (The Courage to Create)

W Somerset Maugham
I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of chaos. The pictres they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art. (Waddington in The Painted Veil, 1925)

Marshall Mcluhan
Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Michelangelo
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
When I am…completely myself, entirely alone…or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these come I know not nor can I force them…Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them gleich alles zusammen [at the same time all together.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination, nor both together, go to the making of a genius. Love, love, love: that is the soul of genius.

Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1991) US painter
It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.
— On the relationship between torment and creativity; in NY “Times,” 17 Nov 1985.

Linda Naiman
Art-making has an alchemical effect on the imagination. It awakens the senses and sharpens insights, teaching us to think in symbols, metaphors, and to de-code complexity, so we can perceive the world in new ways.
Art provides an opportunity for kaleidoscopic thinking. Each time we shift the lens of our perceptions, we gain new perspectives — and new opportunities for innovation.
(creativityatwork.com)
Linda Naiman
Often what the artist expresses is unconscious, but we can learn to decode the story by collaboratively finding the pieces to the puzzle that create new possibilities for innovation. (Vancouver Sun Aug 24/04)

Friedrich Nietzsche
The essence of all beautiful art , all great art , is gratitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche
We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Georgia O’keeffe
To create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.

Ben Okri , Nobel Prize for Literature
Stories are the secret reservoir of values:change the stories individuals or nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

Boris Pasternak (1819 – 1861)
Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
Doctor Zhivago,

Pablo Picasso
Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

I do not seek. I find. (Je ne cherche pas; je trouve)

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convice others of the thruthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.
~ Excerpted from an interview with Marius de Zayas, 1923.

Pascal
I cannot judge my work while I am doing it. I have to do as painters do, stand back and view it from a distance, but not too great a distance. How great? Guess.

Marcel Proust
I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been – if the invention of language had not intervened — the means of communication between souls. (Remembrance of Things Past)

Puccini
The music of this opera [Madama Butterfly] was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public.

John Ringling
Life is short, art is long.

George Bernard Shaw
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I’ve made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Rabindranath Tagore
The world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music.

Tolstoy
There is no genius where there is not simplicity.

Henry Van Dyke
Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The primary benefit of practicing any art , whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.

Andy Warhol
Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art .

Andy Warhol
If there’s ever a problem, I film it and it’s no longer a problem. It’s a film.

Brett Whiteley
The fine art of painting, which is the bastard of alchemy, always has been always will be, a game. The rules of the game are quite simple: in a given arena, on as many psychic fronts as the talent allows, one must visually describe, the centre of the meaning of existense.

Ken Wilber
The purpose of truly transcendent art is to express something you are not yet, but that you can become.
—The Mission of Art by Alex Grey

Ken Wilber
All great transcendental art , is not merely symbolic or imaginary: it is a direct invitation to recognize and realize a deeper dimension of our very own being.  In the eternal trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, art , while it can be good and true, has always staked out the domain of the Beautiful.
—The Mission of Art by Alex Grey

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

Oscar Wilde

Bad artists ays admire each other’s work.