Sunday, July 20, 2008

A collection of quotes for you and me.


Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
- Paul Gauguin

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
- Thomas H. Huxley

"When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him."
- Thomas Szasz

"It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously."
- Peter Ustinov

The truth is more important than the facts.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
- HL Mencken

Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.
- Evan Esar

No human thing is of serious importance.
- Plato

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
- Ernest Hemingway

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.
- Robert Benchley

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Above all, it is a matter of loving art, not understanding it.
- Fernand Leger

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.
- Henry Moore

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.
- Balthus

A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.
- William Dobell

I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. I've found out there aren't any. I wanted to be stopped but no one will stop me.
- Damien Hirst

The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.
- Jackson Pollock

It's not a matter of painting life, it's a matter of giving life to painting.
- Pierre Bonnard

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.
- Harry Golden

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.
- Don Marquis

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.
- Ralph W. Sockman

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
- Sir Francis Bacon

A joke's a very serious thing.
- Charles Churchill

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
- Laurence J. Peter

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
- HL Mencken

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
- Bill Vaughan

Only the shallow know themselves.
- Oscar Wilde

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
- John Cage

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
- Philip K. Dick

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
- Pablo Picasso

Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.
- Jules Renard

Art is science made clear.
- Jean Cocteau

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
- James Thurber

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
- Plato

The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
- Robertson Davies

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
- Pablo Picasso

When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong-- or absolutely right.
- Albert Guinon

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.
- Marquis de Vauvenargues