"The great difficulty and the Crown of Art is to draw, to paint, to write with ease and simplicity"  Rodin

"Creativity isn't the monopoly of artists. This is the crucial fact I've come to realize, and this broader concept of creativity is my concept of art. When I say everybody is an artist, I mean everybody can determine the content of life in his particular sphere, whether in painting, music, engineering, caring for the sick, the economy or whatever. All around us the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped or created. But our idea of culture is severely restricted because we've always applied it to art. The dilemma of museums and other cultural institutions stems from the fact that culture is such an isolated field, and that art is even more isolated: an ivory tower in the field of culture surrounded first by the whole complex of culture and education, and then by the media which are also part of culture. We have a restricted idea of culture which debases everything; and it is the debased concept of art that has forced museums into their present weak and isolated position. Our concept of art must be universal and have the interdisciplinary nature of a university, and there must be a university department with a new concept of art and science".
- Joseph Beuys, 1979

"We must cultivate our own garden, that is to say; the world is mad and cruel; Kings fight and churches rend each other. Let us limit our activity and try to do as well as we can, the small task that seems to be within our powers" Voltaire

"To be survived by sculpture in bronze what a responsibility! Bronze is so very indestructible"  Degas

"True Poets are those who listen to themselves live, and sing what they hear"
                                                                        Marcel Schwob about Colette

"You can't force an idea to come to you," he says, "but you can make preparations. It's like you can't force yourself to go to sleep, but you can lay comfortably in the bed and close your eyes, get nice and cozy, and eventually you'll go to sleep. If you sit in a chair, and you have a desire for ideas, you begin to daydream, and as you're daydreaming you're sinking deeper in. And all of a sudden you can catch one."
                                                    David Lynch

"The artist must impose himself and his ideas on to the material in a way that uses the material sympathetically but does not use it passively. Otherwise you are only behaving like the waves. There must be a human imprint."   Henry Moore

"In short, no sudden inspiration can replace the long toil, which is indispensable to give the eye the true knowledge of form and of proportion, and to render the hand obedient to the commands of feeling"  Rodin

"There are moments in lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall this vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts to a greater knowledge"  Robert Henri

"My thing is the best songs come out of the ground, just like a potato. You plan and plan, and then you wait for the potato."   Tom Waits

"But there was also in it the curious ecstasy which comes from "feeling" the mind work smoothly and imaginatively upon difficult, complicated problems. The excitement of the ruthless pursuit of truth which, perhaps, never entirely leaves one, but which is so intense when one is very young. And finally that astonishing and astonished happiness described by Keats which comes to one when some new constellation of thought, some new vision of a profound truth swims into one's kin"  Virginia Woolf

"Art is contemplation...it is the joy of the intellect which sees clearly into the universe and which recreates it with conscientious vision... It is the refection of the artists heart upon all the objects that he creates"  Rodin

"The limitations we impose upon ourselves, as the French say, permit us to dance in chains"  
                                                                                                                                            Florence Koehler

"Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring? The painting of Gustave Moreau is painting of ideas, the deepest poetry of Shelley, the works of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys"       James Joyce

"Man's need for art, no less than his need for religion and philosophy is rooted in his capacity to mirror himself in thought"           Hegel

"The secret of the grand masters is like the secret of happiness; we expect ecstasies, lightening bolts, super human struggles, and yet this happiness is a very simple thing, very human, almost banal; God is neither an earthquake nor a conflagration nor a miracle; He is only a passing breeze."         Nikos Kazantzakis

"Poetry is enthusiasm tamed by metaphor" Robert Frost

"They tell of blossoming, of early sunshine, of sunburn on the forehead, of chilly shade, of uncomprehended repulsion, of childish trust betrayed, of suspicion, of brooding sadness." Colette

"In all cases Moore has respected the natural qualities of his chosen material, exploring its potentials with out violating its limitations. There is in fact, a sense of inevitability in all of Moores work - a feeling that these sculptures could not have turned out any other way."

"The sensuous and the spiritual which struggle as opposites in the common understanding are revealed as reconciled in the truth expressed in art"   Hegel

"I mentioned a particular quality of a thing handmade, which by comparison I can best suggest thus; by the grandeur that comes of the effort of one man to hold together upon one instrument as if he were breaking a wild monster to bridle and riding, one of the larger fugues of Bach on an organ, as against the slick collaborations and effortless climaxes of the same piece in the manipulations of an orchestra"   James Agee

"As for me, I don't hold grudges and I obligingly admit to everything, I'm always ready to criticize myself, providing I'm not forced to." Sartre

"As Sidhartha left the grove in which the Budda, the Perfect One, remained, in which Govinda remained, he felt that he had also left his former life behind him in the grove. As he slowly went on his way, his head was full of this thought. He reflected deeply, until his feeling completely overwhelmed him and he reached a point where he recognized causes; for to recognize causes, it seemed to him, is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature"  Hesse

"And fortunately, there is no progress in art - in the by paths of human endeavor there is endless variety. In other words, inspiration, not information, is the force behind all creative acts." Man Ray

"Art is that which the sculptor or painter should seek beneath the mask of features"   Rodin

"I love painting for its tenderness, its opacities and translucencies, its reserves and contrasts, its magical charge of color."           Jacob Kainen

"To see the cradle of a river, or of an idea, is always for me the source of an ineffable joy and sadness."
Nikos Kazantzakis

"The pictures of Willem de Kooning... have an air of authority-in-crisis ... The dilemma is one of time - how to charge the abstract image with the emotional shock of the form distorted from nature, and  how to make a natural form soak up all the potentialities of a mature, modern style.
A similar ambivalence is found in Van Gogh and Soutine, who both resolved it in an anguished identification of the creative act with its subject. de Kooning's personal solution involves making the crisis itself the hero of the painting"

"A work of art is no natural product, but a thing brought into being by human activity"  Hegel

"To sum it up, you must not attribute too much importance to the themes that you interpret, with out at doubt, they have their value and help to charm the public, but the principle care should be to form living muscles"      Rodin

"If one were permitted to paint in bright scarlet a tree that looked reddish brown, then why not translate plastically and exaggerate impressions such as those substantiated in the metaphors of poets? Going so far as to deform the curvature of a back, exaggerate the pearly white of a carnation, or stiffen the symmetry of the branches of a tree."  Vuillard

"All good art demands an effort from the observer"     Henry Moore

"His paintings remind me of the overse of a tapestry, the weight of the human figures, and the gold and silver of light and the velvet of shadow - all appear in different guise. He is an art too, of attitudes and folded arms and pale hands. Vuillard has found a new and delicious way of expressing the poetry of a quiet hearth and the beauty of thought and action that underlies that poetry" Gustave Geffroy

"We thus came to realize that each work of art was a transposition of visual facts, a caricature so to speak, the impassioned equivalent of a visual impression made on one. This method cleared away all the obstacles which simply copying imposed on our painterly techniques." Gauguin

"It has never been a matter of copying nature (but) a matter of finding an equivalent.  That is capturing simultaneously within the frame of life, movement, and a harmony created by assembling lines, colors and forms... independent of representation"  Functions of Painting

"...the form of a man's rattle may be in accordance with instructions received in the dream by which he obtained his power"               Frances Densmore "The Study of Indian Music"

    Dissanayake writes about rhythms and modes—referring to the ways a work of art unfolds in time and space and to the variety of textures and sensations it deploys. For example, a singer may establish a relationship with his audience through patterns of anticipation, delay, and satisfaction. It is probably no accident that these patterns are also characteristic of mother-infant bonding and adult lovemaking. Dissanayake speculates that the techniques of making special are part of the standard human equipment for creating and maintaining affectionate relationships. Like mothering and courtship, they are affiliative behaviors.

                                                                                            Ellen Dissanayake

"By transgressing the law that they themselves had laid down, the parents have stooped to the level of the child, making his weakness their own"              Rene Girard on Marcel Proust

"I don't like recipes. They keep cooks from using their intuition. And intuition is precisely what so much of cooking is about"              Richard Olney

"Has it occurred to you that what looks like calamity may be a gift given to you - just possibly - because you are the rare being who can use a hard gift like this?"           May Sarton

"I was beginning to find myself. I was almost nothing, at most an activity with out content, but that was all that was needed. I was escaping from play-acting. I was not yet working but I had already stopped playing. The liar was finding his truth in the elaboration of his lies. I was born of writing. Before that there was only a play of mirrors. With my first novel, I know that a child had gone into the hall of mirrors. By writing I was existing. I was escaping from the grownups, but I existed only in order to write and if I said "I" that meant "I who write" In any case I knew joy. "       Sartre

"Summerfield puts it this way, an artist is what he is. He is both weak and strong. He makes decisions. He makes decisions fluidly in some areas and is struck with indecision in others. There does not exist in my view the perfect artist. That paragon who makes no mistakes, takes no wrong turns. This is no apology. It is simply a statement of the risk we each take as artists - the risk of finding out what we are. Perhaps most of my work can be considered a homage, to the creators of the past, to nature, to the things which make it possible to survive the morning newspaper."

"God as the ultimate arbiter of whether one has exploited a talent or served by means of it..... the still small voice."          May Sarton

"The nude is not a subject of art but a form of art"       Kenneth Clark

"There always were as my nurse and Virgil said, tears before evening....  tears for things, Virgil says, not for any particular thing - just tears before evening."       Virginia Woolf

In the wake of Sept. 11, some may find the Lynchian world suddenly a little too close for comfort. There is a moment in "Fire Walk With Me," for example, when the Log Lady warns Laura, "When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first. And the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy." But for those willing to stare down the darkness, Lynch's films are, like our own nightmares, oddly informative. Whether onscreen or in the world outside, we can't defeat our demons without knowing who they are. "It's about examining hard realities," says Lynch. "I think it's safe to say the world's getting crazier all the time, and facing the music is all you can do. That can be a beautiful thing."       David Lynch
   

"Let Velasquez paint Sebastian the dwarf of Philippe IV. He endows him with such a touching gaze that we instantly read in it all the painful secret of his poor afflicted creature, forced for his livelihood to lower his human dignity, to become a plaything, a living bauble. And the more poignant the martyrdom of the conscience lodged in this grotesque body, the more beautiful is the artists work."  Rodin

"There is a tie between the artist who creates and the amateur who appreciates a delicate atmosphere that is inexplicable, that is the vehicle for the great affections that gather around us"          Functions of Painting

"Why then do we frame pictures? Why, when they are not framed, do they make a different effect? Because then they no longer stand out against the accident of their surroundings; without frames they are suddenly no longer sure of themselves; they are no longer self contained; one has the feeling that they have come apart, and one is rather disappointed; they seem the worse all the sudden, that is to say, worse than they really are. Their frame, when they have one, lifts them out of Nature; it forms a window of the spirit where the painted flower is no longer a flower that fades, but the image of all flowers as such. The frame has moved it outside of time. To that extent there is a tremendous difference between the area inside a frame and the area outside, which is infinite. Certainly they would be poor painters indeed who looked to the frame to rescue them; I am not suggesting that things assume symbolic significance just because they are inside a frame; but they do, whether they want to or not, stake a claim to such significance. So what does a frame say to us? It is saying: look this way, here you will find something worth seeing, something outside the vagaries of chance and time; here you will find the image that remains -  not the flowers that fade, but the mental picture"   Max Frisch