124
Amaging
and Beautiful Quotes
“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are
lost.” -
J.R.R. Tolkien
“Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.”
-Robert
Henri
“Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.” -Marc
Chagall
“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of
ways to kneel and kiss
the ground.” -Rumi
“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” -A.A. Milne
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have
known defeat,
known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found
their way out of the
depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and
an understanding of
life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep
loving concern. Beautiful
people do not just happen.” -Elizabeth Kubler Ross
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own
nature into his pictures.” -Henry Ward Beecher
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen
or even touched, but must be felt with the heart.” -Helen Keller
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and science.” -Albert Einstein
“Beauty is the illumination of your soul.” -John ODonohue
“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our
hearts are conscious of our treasures.” -Thornton
Wilder
“The only journey is the one within.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart…” -William
Wordsworth
“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
-Francis Bacon
“To be an artist is to
believe in life.” -Henry Moore
“Are we to paint whats on the face, whats inside the face, or whats behind it?” -
Picasso
“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will
set off a revolution.”
-Paul Cezanne
“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find
it.” -Andre Gide
“The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
-Gloria Steinem
“Whatever you are, be a good one.” -Abraham Lincoln
”Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; well find it.” -Sam Levenson
“Y ou connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that
is inside of you that
connects with something inside of him. All you have as your
guide is that you know
what moves you.” -Steven Brust
”At some point everyone must decide if they are a creator or a
critic, a lover or a
hater, a giver or a taker.” -unknown
“The trouble with having an open mind, is that people will
insist on coming along
and trying to put things in it.” -Terry Pratchett
We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and
our imperfections. If we
cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to
love others or our
potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world
rest in the fearlessness
and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” -John
Lennon
“Promise me youll always remember: youre braver than you believe, and stronger
than you seem, and smarter than you think.” -Christopher Robin
(to Pooh)
“Y ou must be the change you wish to see in the world.” -Gandhi
“Unbeing dead isnt being alive.” -E.E. Cummings
“Now and then its good to pause in our
pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” -
Guillaume Apollinaire
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small
people always do
that, but the really great ones make you feel that you too can
become great.” -Mark
Twain
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also
what it takes to sit
down and listen.” -Winston Churchill
“Be silent, or say something better than silence.” -Pythagoras
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the
things you get
ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things
that seemed
limitless when they were in your head to no more than living
size when theyre
brought out. But its more than that, isnt it? The most important things lie too close
to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a
treasure your enemies
would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost
you dearly only
to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding
what youve said at
all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost
cried while you were
saying it. Thats the worst, I think.
When the secret stays locked within not for want
of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” -Stephen King
“I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”
-Vincent van Gogh
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools
because they have to
say something.” -Plato
“People are often unreasonable and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you.
Be honest anyway.
If you find happiness, people may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough.
Give your best anyway.”
-Mother Teresa
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target
no one else can see.” -
Arthur Schopenhauer
“I am not here to change the world. I am changing the world
because I am here.” -
Lisa Wilson
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters
compared to what lives
within us.” -Emerson
“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you
except yourself” -Rita
Mae Brown
“The things that make me different are the things that make me.”
-A. A. Milne
“Y our time is limited, so dont waste it living someone elses life.” -Steve Jobs
“Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.” -André Gide
“Dont try to figure out what
other people want to hear from you; figure out what
you have to say. Its the one and only thing you have to offer.” -Barbara Kingsolver
“Were fools whether we
dance or not, so we might as well dance.” -unknown
“Y our time is limited,
so dont waste it living
someone elses life. Dont be trapped by
dogma — which is living with the results of other peoples thinking. Dont let the
noise of others opinions drown out your
own inner voice. And most important, have
the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow
already know what
you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” -Steve
Jobs
“It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what
you are not.” -André
Gide
“There are hundreds of paths up the mountain, all leading to the
same place, so it
doesnt matter which path you
take. The only person wasting time is the one who
runs around the mountain, telling everyone that his or her path
is wrong.” -Hindu
proverb
“Poor is the soul whose pleasure depends upon the permission of
another.” -
Madonna
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking
others to live as one wishes
to live.” -Oscar Wilde
“To create ones own world takes
courage.” -Georgia OKeeffe
”There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
I feel this is right for
me,
I know that this is wrong.
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
Whats right for you–just
listen to
The voice that speaks inside.” -Shel Silverstein
“The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult
thing to be is what
other people want you to be.” -Leo Buscaglia
”We are all a little weird and lifes a little weird, and when we find someone whose
weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall
in mutual
weirdness and call it love.” -Dr. Seuss
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no
path and leave a
trail.” -Emerson
“Resist much. Obey little.” -Walt Whitman
”If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step,
you know its not your
path. Y our own path you make with every step you take. Thats why its your path.”
-Joseph Campbell
“If you cant beat them, join them.
If you cant join them, its probably because you
just tried to beat them.” -unknown
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking
they dont have
any.” –Alice Walker
“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made
a victim. Accept no
ones definition of your
life; define yourself.” -Robert Frost
“A critic is a man who knows the way but cant drive the car.” -Kenneth Tynan
“To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the
right to be different is
maybe even greater.” -Bono
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends
and fads and
popular opinion.” -Jack Kerouac
“Do not compromise yourself. Y ou are all you have got.” -Janis
Joplin
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for youll be criticized anyway.” -Eleanor
Roosevelt
“If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants,
art will be a
meaningless recreation.” -Albert Camus
“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.”
-Kurt Cobain
“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” -Anne
Sexton
“Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier
struggle. To some a blessing.
To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside
yourself and drag forth
from your very soul an idea.” -Lou Dorfsman
“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” -Pablo Picasso
“Life isnt about finding
yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” -G.B. Shaw
“Everythings already been said, but
since nobody was listening, we have to start
again.” -Andre Gide
“Creativity takes courage.” -Henri Matisse
“Ill be more enthusiastic
about encouraging thinking outside the box when theres
evidence of any thinking going on inside it.” -Terry Pratchett
“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. What we do
with this hour and
with that one, is what we are doing.” -Annie Dillard
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” -Albert Einstein
“I invent nothing, I rediscover.” -Auguste Rodin
“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from
the head, almost
nothing.” -Marc Chagall
“Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you.
Unfold your own myth.” -
Rumi
“Find something only you can say” -James Dickey
“Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making
something out of it after it is
found.” -James Russell Lowell
“Free your mind and your ass will follow” -George Clinton
“Art is not about thinking something up. It is the
opposite–getting something
down.” -Julia Cameron
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is
knowing which ones to
keep.” -Scott Adams
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
-Jung
“Everything that we encounter leaves traces behind. Everything
contributes
imperceptibly to our education” -Goethe
“The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see
them, you need only
look at the work clearly — without judgment, without need or
fear, without wishes
or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it
needs, not what
you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good
parent listens to a
child” -David Bayles
“Everything in life comes to you as a teacher. Pay Attention.
Learn Quickly.” -
Cherokee saying
“Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it.
Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is life, fight for it.”
-Mother Teresa
“Y ou may not be a Picasso or Mozart but you dont have to be. Just create to create.
Create to remind yourself youre still alive. Make stuff to inspire others to make
something too. Create to learn a bit more about yourself.” -Frederick Terral
“We are not on this earth to accumulate victories, things, and
experiences, but to be
whittled and sandpapered until whats left is who we truly are.” -Arianna Huffington
“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.”
-Cyril Connolly
“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Everything
we shut our eyes
to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate,
or despise, serves
to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, or evil, can
become a source of
beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every
moment is a golden one
for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.” -Henry
Miller
“The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the
imperfections of your current
piece.” -David Bayles
“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” -Jimi Hendrix
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come
to our real
work, and then we no longer know which way to go, we have begun
our real
journey.” -Wendell Berry
“Its better to fail in
originality, than succeed in imitation.” -Herman Melville
“I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good
intentions.” -
Augusten Burroughs
“Some succeed because they are destined. Some succeed because
they are
determined.” -unknown
“Life is pretty simple: Y ou do some stuff. Most fails. Some
works. Y ou do more of
what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do
something else. The
trick is the doing something else.” -Leonardo da Vinci
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” -Lao Tzu
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have
ended up where I
needed to be.” -Douglas Adams
“Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and
empty hearts can
do that.” -Norman Vincent Peale
“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” -Vincent van
Gogh
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such
thing. Making your
unknown known is the important thing.” -Georgia OKeeffe
“Do not fear mistakes—there are none.” -Miles Davis
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most
massive characters are
seared with scars.” -Khalil Gibran
“Y ou should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is,
because this is all part of
experience, and the more experience you have, the better it
is…unless it kills you,
shape or form.
and then you know you have gone too far.” -Alice Neel
“Fail, fail again, fail better.” -Samuel Beckett
“When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the
step into the
darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things
will
happen….There will be something solid for us to stand on or we
will be taught to
fly.” -Patrick Overton
“Destiny is a feeling you have that you know something about
yourself nobody else
does. The picture you have in your own mind of what youre about will come true.”
-Bob Dylan
“The bird of paradise alights only on the hand that does not
grasp.” -John Berry
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our
wings on the way
down.” -Kurt Vonnegut
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone
told me. All of us
who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
But there is this
gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, its just not that good. Its trying to be
good, it has potential, but its not. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most
people I know who do
interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know
our work doesnt
have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go
through this. And if you
are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta
know its normal and the
most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put
yourself on a deadline so
that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going
through a volume of
work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good
as your ambitions.
And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone Ive ever met. Its gonna
take awhile. Its normal to take awhile.
Y ouve just gotta fight your
way through.” -
Ira Glass
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” -Rumi
“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that
you do not
understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the
meaning of them.” -
E.M. Forster
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned in order to
have the life that is
waiting for us.” -Joseph Campbell
“Only those that risk going too far can possibly find out how
far one can go.” -T.S.
Eliot
“Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful.
Conceit is selfgiven.
Be careful.” – John Wooden
“I have great faith in fools — my friends call it
self-confidence.” -Edgar Allan Poe
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get
a heartache when
we read those lines written by the hand of a master and
recognize them as our own,
as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the
faith to believe in our
own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. We are all
kings, all poets, all
musicians; we have only to open up to discover what is already
there.” -Henry
Miller
“To dare is to lose ones footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.” -Soren
Kierkegaard
“Listen to the mustnts, child. Listen to the donts. Listen to the shouldnts, the
impossibles, the wonts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything
can happen, child. Anything can be.” -Shel Silverstein
”Dont judge each day by the
harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” -
Robert Louis Stevenson
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
-Joseph Chilton
Pearce
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
-Joseph Campbell
“Ive been absolutely
terrified every moment of my life and Ive never let it keep me
from doing a single think that I wanted to do.” -Georgia OKeeffe
“Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she
will show herself.” -
Eugene Delacroix
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep
inside us something
is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to
our touch. Once we
believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous
delight or any
experience that reveals the human spirit.” -E.E. Cummings
“Y ou are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your
depths where life calmly
gives out its own secret.” -Rilke
“Its not denial. Im just selective about the reality I accept.” -Calvin and Hobbes
“It always seems impossible until its done.” -Nelson Mandela
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
-Goethe
“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” -Sylvia Plath
“One of the secrets of life is that all that is really worth the
doing is what we do for
others” -Lewis Carroll
“Give what you have. To someone else it may be better than you
dare to think.” -
Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the
life of the candle will
not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.”
-Buddha
“No act of kindness,
however small, is ever wasted.” -Aesop
“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark
from another person.
Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who
have lighted the
flame within us.” -Albert Schweitzer
“The way to happiness: Keep your heart free from hate, your mind
from worry. Live
simply, expect little, give much. Scatter sunshine, forget
yourself, and think of
others.” -Norman Vincent Peale
“To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the
desire to be a good
artist.” -Jasper Johns
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us
with our fellow
men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions
run as causes,
and they come back to us as effects.” -Herman Melville
“When you learn, teach, when you get, give.” -Maya Angelou
“Talent is a gift that brings with it an obligation to serve the
world, and not
ourselves, for it is not of our making.” -Jose Marti
“He neither serves nor rules, he transmits. His position is
humble and the beauty at
the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.” -Paul Klee
“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and dont be sorry.” -Jack Kerouac
“This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” -Thoreau
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
-Henri Matisse
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over
the place: from the
sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing
shape, from a spiders
web.” -Pablo Picasso
“Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in
it.” -Philip K. Dick
“I shut my eyes in order to see.” -Paul Gauguin
“To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.” -Anatole
France
“Y ou need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and
listen. Y ou need
not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and
still, and solitary. The
world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no
choice; it will roll in
ecstasy at your feet.” -Kafka
“Silence is the mother of truth.” -Benjamin Disraeli
“Its not what you look at
that matters, its what you see.”
-Thoreau
“No artist tolerates reality.” -Nietzsche
“Who looks outside,
dreams… who looks inside, awakes.” -Carl Jung
“Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a f**king
sharp knife to it.” -
Banksy
“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the
talent to the dark
place where it leads.” -Erica Jong
“We work in the dark, we give what we have. Our doubt is our
passion, and our
passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” -Henry
James
“Those who danced were thought to be insane by those who could
not hear the
music.” -Nietzsche
“Being crazy isnt enough.” -Dr. Seuss
“Follow your inner moonlight; dont hide the madness.” -Allen Ginsberg
“The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is,
perhaps, that the artist has
the restraint or courtesy to conceal the intensity of his
obsession from all except
those similarly afflicted.” -Osbert Sitwell
“When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. Theres a thin line between being brilliantly
creative and acting like the biggest idiot on earth.” -Cynthia
Heimel
“Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough
to be capable, not
many have the courage for it.” -August Strindberg
“The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy, only the
artist, the great artist, knows
how difficult it is.” -Willa Cather
“One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven
on by some demon
whom one can neither resist nor understand.” -George Orwell
“Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear – and
devils, too.” -Graycie
Harmon
”Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are
called mad and
are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day.
Others are called writers
and they do pretty much the same thing.” -Meg Chittenden
“What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I
have seen in
darkness.” -M.C. Escher
“Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.”
-Constantin Brancusi
“Y ou cant wait for inspiration.
Sometimes you have to go after it with a club.” –
Jack London
“Im killing time while I
wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.” -
Calvin and Hobbes
“Let your boat of life be
light, packed with only what you need – a homely home
and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name,
someone to love and
someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to
eat and enough to
wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a
dangerous thing.” -
Jerome K. Jerome
“I dont wait for moods. Y ou
accomplish nothing if you do that. Y our mind must
know it has got to get down to work.” -Pearl S. Buck
“Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your
life.” -Irving Stone
“I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”
-Vincent van Gogh
“To see far is one thing, going there is another.” -Constantin
Brancusi
“Failure is the path of least persistence” -unknown
“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” -Salvador Dali
“Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.”
-Benjamin Jowett
“Y ou ask me why I spend my life writing? Do I find
entertainment? Is it
worthwhile? Above all, does it pay? If not, then, is there a
reason?… I write only
because there is a voice within me. That will not be still.”
-Sylvia Plath
“Y ou have to write the book that wants to be written. And if
the book will be too
difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
-Madeleine LEngle
“We do not write as we want, but as we can.” -W. Somerset Maugham
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all,
shoot it, play it, lose it,
all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a
later place in the
book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.
Something more will arise
for later, something better.” -Annie Dillard
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up
to live.” -Thoreau
“The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits
what others dont dare
reveal.” -Elia Kazan
“Its much more important to
write than to be written about.” -Gabriel Garcia
Marquez
“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a
chore for the
reader who reads.” -Dr. Seuss
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong
word.” -Stephen King
“True storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error
of defining it.” -
Hannah Arendt
“I never think when I
write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do
them both well.” -Don Marquis
“A little talent is good to have if you want to be a writer, but
the only real
requirement is the ability to remember every scar.” -Stephen
King
“Writing is a struggle against silence.” -Carlos Fuentes
“Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if
it be against his
will.” -Goethe
“A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.”
-Karl Kraus
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” -Stephen King
“Words are things. A small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a
thought, produces
that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.” -Byron