ART QUOTES


"Artists are," observed composer Ned Rorem,
"like everyone else, only more so."
-Personal Freedom

"Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing
but the highest quality to your moments as they pass."
-Pater

"Poetry is definitely emotional. It presents the emotions of
the poet as they are aroused by some scene of beauty, some
experience, some attachment."
-Handbook of Literature

"Writing bridges the inner and outer worlds and connects
the paths of action and reflection."
-Life's Companion

"And so we write with rhythms that belong to that event,
with words that sound out feeling and thought."
-Macrorie

"Great fiction can make us laugh or cry, in much the way that
life can, and it gives us at least the powerful illusion that when
we do so we're doing pretty much the same things we do when we
laugh at Uncle Herman's jokes, or cry at funerals."
-Art of Fiction

"A friend of Michael Angelo saying to him that his constant
labor for art must make him think of death with regret - 'By
no means,' he said; 'for if life be a pleasure, yet since
death also is sent by the hand of the same Master, neither
should that displease us."
-[]

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

"Musick and women I cannot but give way to, whatever
my business is."
-Pepys

"Death is in my sight today
As when a man desires to see home
When he has spent many years in captivity."
-Anonymous

"If there is a God that has made the earth and put this hope and
passion in us," Tennyson once said, "it must be the truth. If
it be not true, then no God but a mocking fiend created us and
I'd shake my fist in his almighty face and tell him that I cursed
him - I'd sink my head straight in a chloroformed handkerchief and
have done with it all."
-Tennyson

"The springs of human greatness, according to Hawkes, are
the development and exercise of the combined mental powers
of intellect and imagination."
-Mattoon

"The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

-Francis Bourdillon

"An enchanted world is one that speaks to the soul, to the
mysterious depths of the heart and imagination where we find
value, love, and union with the world around us."
-Moore

"O Love, O fire! Once she drew
With one long kiss my whole soul thro'
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew."
-Tennyson

"My own dim life should teach me this,
That life shall live for evermore,
Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is."
-Tennyson

"For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within."
-Tennyson

"...his wealth of activity, give me a feeling of warmth and
fervor which I love, a feeling of expansion, of ampleness,
plenitude. I could not live any longer in an empty world.
I must have much to love, much to hate, much to grapple with."
-Anais Nin

"Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me,
I wish none of this had never happened."

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times but
that is not for them to decide. All you have
to decide is what to do with the time given to you."

-Fellowship of the Ring [The film versiion]


"Do I stand and call unto the sea for answer?
Ah, wisdom, where art thou?
A gull but shows thee to the Southland,
And leaden sky but warneth thee of storm.
And wind, thou art but a changeling.
So, shall I call to thee? Not so.
I built not upon the spray,
And seek not within the smaller world,
For God dwelleth not abroad, but deep within."
-Patience Worth

"Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I;
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by."

-Christina Rossetti

"Writers create books the way we write lifetimes. A writer
can lead any character, to any event, for any purpose, to
make any point."
-Richard Bach

"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things,
literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing
with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting
people. Forget yourself."
-Henry Miller

"When we're living at our highest capabilities, experiencing
life to the fullest, we're alternating between unconscious
and conscious behavior."
-Macrorie

"When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him
of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's
concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of
his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art
establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the
touchstones of our judgement."
-John F. Kennedy


The Rose

"Some say love it is the river that drowns the tender reed.
Some say love it is the razor that leaves your soul to bleed.
Some say love it is a hunger an aching endless need.
I say love it is a flower and you, it's only seed.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to Dance.
It's the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance.
It's the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to give,
and the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.

When the night has been to lonely and the road has been to long,
and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong.
Just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows
lies the seed that with the sun's love in the spring
Becomes the Rose."

-Amanda McBride


"The heart is an organ of fire."
-The English Patient

"A chance line written by a favorite author can have a greater
effect upon us and cause life-altering transformations far
greater in intensity, than any statements made by relatives or friends."
-WJ, Afterdeath Journal

"Bang! Now the animal
Is dead and dumb and done.
Nevermore to peep again, creep
Again, leap again,
Eat or sleep or drink again,
Oh, What Fun!"

-Walter Mare

"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what
the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."
-Robert Louis Stevenson

"The person who understands any work of art grows with each facet
of experience shared with the artist. In other words, our
boundaries are expanded as we add the artist's experience to our
own, thereby increasing the data in our own personal computer bank."
-Freedom

"The sole substitute for an experience which we have not
ourselves lived through is art and literature."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Life that dares send
A challenge to his end
And when it comes, say, Welcome friend!"
-Richard Crashaw