Arts Quotes

“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
― Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82

“Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.”
― Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words

“Ignore all hatred and criticism. Live for what you create, and die protecting it.”
― Lady Gaga

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.”
― O. Henry, The Complete Works of O. Henry

“Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to
become a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt your
parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can
do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've
been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”
― Francisco de Goya

“If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.”
― Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies

“Dancing, at its best, is independence and intimacy in balance.”
― Donna Goddard, The Love of Devotion

“Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“You must have the Devil in you to succeed in any of the arts”
― Voltaire

“The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.”
― Leonard Bernstein

“Since art is considered a noble field, art should be used to promote all that is good and noble, and in a noble fashion.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“We quickly became friends with other art faculty members such as the ceramist Jim Leedy and his wife Jean and art historian/artist Bill Kortlander and his wife Betty. I also began taking classes in Southeast Asian history with John Cady, who had resigned from his position at the U.S.[CB4] [mo5]  State Department because he thought it would be a huge mistake to get involved in a “land war in Southeast Asia.” In 1966, his warnings were starting to become all too obvious as the Vietnam war grew and protests against it emerged. Dr. Cady was in the thick of the protests and was even being shadowed by the F.B.I. After I finished my BFA in art in 1966, I began work on a master’s degree in history at Dr. Cady’s urging. He and his wife became frequent guests at our parties”
― Mallory M. O'Connor, The Kitchen and the Studio: A Memoir of Food and Art

“...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.”
― J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights

“Give a poet a pen”
― A. Jarrell Hayes

“The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.”
― John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

“Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth.”
― Byrd Gibbens

“It’s so easy to lose faith and become lost in all of the politics of the world. That’s why we need the arts. To sublimate our frustration and anger into something beautiful. Freud called sublimation a virtuous defence mechanism because it is in the arts that we can find our humanity.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“When there is no tension between the inner beingness and that which is being expressed, there is grace.”
― Donna Goddard, The Love of Devotion

“Giving Back reframes portraits of philanthropy.”
― Valaida Fullwood, Giving Back: A Tribute to Generations of African American Philanthropists

“Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the ’20s, Beat poets in the ’50s, and rock musicians in the ’60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.”
― Leonardo DiCaprio

“Many people don’t realize the connection between music and literature and I’m here to tell them that it does exist!”
― Veronika Carnaby