Quotes to inspire and reflect

In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.

Unextinguished laughter shakes the skies.

If life must not be taken too seriously—then so neither must death.

Skills vary with the man. We must tread a straight path and strive by that which is born in us.

Most do violence to their natural aptitude, and thus attain superiority in nothing.

Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered what is hardest for us.

The same man cannot well be skilled / in everything; each has his special excellence.

’Tis skill, not strength, that governs a ship.

As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Art is the child of Nature.

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

Art is a line around your thoughts.

Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.

Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature’s unrealized ends.

Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.

Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art.

As a suffering creature, I cannot do without something greater than I—something that is my life—the power to create.

My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.

I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say “he feels deeply; he feels tenderly.”

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Photograph: A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

A small drop of ink makes thousands, perhaps millions … think.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written—it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period put just at the right place.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

The stone unhewn and cold Becomes a living mold. The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows.

A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking.

I did my sculpture as a painter. I did not work as a sculptor.

As picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form.

Sculpture, a very noble art, is one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade … the painter has to invent a process, [whereas] sculpture is helped by nature.

A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.

Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature, That fashions all her works in high relief, And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth, Was molded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women, and all animals that breathe Are statues, and not paintings.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man’s mind.