Artistry Quotes

“In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.”
― Anais Nin

“There doesn't seem like there should be an artful way to butcher a cow, but there is, and this is not it.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races

“Do whatever you do intensely. The artist is the man who leaves the crowd and goes pioneering. With him there is an idea which is his life.”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“A poet is a unique creature that resides within a human being, embodying a distinct kind of consciousness.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”
― Martha Graham

“Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”
― Eduardo Galeano

“Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“As Gill says, "every man is called to give love to the work of his hands. Every man is called to be an artist." The small family farm is one of the last places - they are getting rarer every day - where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker - and some farmers still do talk about "making the crops" - is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. This certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical or uneconomic one. In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer, and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the means of life, the goodness of food, and the longevity and dependability of the sources of food, both natural and cultural. The proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food

“For more than three decades, coffee has captured my imagination because it is a beverage about individuals as well as community. A Rwandan farmer. Eighty roast masters at six Starbucks plants on two continents. Thousands of baristas in 54 countries. Like a symphony, coffee's power rests in the hands of a few individuals who orchestrate its appeal. So much can go wrong during the journey from soil to cup that when everything goes right, it is nothing short of brilliant! After all, coffee doesn't lie. It can't. Every sip is proof of the artistry -- technical as well as human -- that went into its creation.”
― Howard Schultz, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul

“If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“One must know a bad performance to know a good one. You can't be middle-of-the-road about it, just as you can't be middle-of-the-road about life. I mean, you can't say about Hitler, I can take him or leave him. Well, I can't be middle-of-the-road about a performance, especially my own. I feel that if I can vomit at seeing a bad performance, I'm ahead of the game.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography

“The essence of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance alters at every moment.”
― Claude Monet

“If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more.”
― Gregory Peck

“The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“There was a man with tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content.”
― Stephen Crane

“He who can command, he who is a ‘master’ by nature, he who is forceful in deed and gesture – what has he to do with contracts! Such beings violate our every assumption: they come unexpectedly, without cause, reason, notice, excuse; they appear as suddenly as lightning, and are too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too ‘different’ even to be hated. Their work is the instinctive creation and imposition of forms; of all artists, their work is the most instinctive, unconscious – in connection with appearance there arises something new, a system of governance which is alive , in which the functions and parts are defined and related to one another, in which above all no part finds a place unless it has some ‘function’ in connection with the whole. These instinctive organizers, they know nothing of guilt, responsibility, consideration; they are subject to that terrible artist-egoism which gleams like brass, and which sees itself justified to all eternity, in its work, even as a mother sees in her child.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

“Be true to the artist in you and the art will be true to you.”
― Christina Strigas, A Book of Chrissyisms

“Ah, when one has not the gift of rendering one's grief superbly and transforming it into literary or musical passages which weep magnificently, the best thing is to keep still about it.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Beauty was expected,” Grayson replied. “Technique without artistry is
worthless.” He looked down at the remains of the violin he’d destroyed.
“Beauty is a lie.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Final Gambit

“A lot of people do not value art. Rather than admit they don’t understand it, they tend to trivialise it.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Let us now remind ourselves that the artist is also a man, and as a man responsible for all that his will consents to; "in order that a man may make right use of his art, he needs to have a virtue which will rectify his appetite." The man is responsible directly, as a murderer for example by intent if he intends to manufacture adulterated food, or drugs in excess of medical requirement; responsible as a promoter of loose living if he exhibits a pornographic picture, (by which we mean of course something essentially salacious, preserving the distinction of “obscene” from “erotic”); responsible spiritually if he is a sentimentalist or pseudo-mystic. It is a mistake to suppose that in former ages the artist’s “freedom” could have been arbitrarily denied by an external agency; it is much rather a plain and unalterable fact that the artist as such is not a free man. As artist he is morally irresponsible, indeed; but who can assert that he is an artist and not also a man? The artist can be separated from the man in logic and for purposes of understanding; but actually, the artist can only be divorced from his humanity by what is called a disintegration of personality. The doctrine of art for art's sake implies precisely such a sacrifice of humanity to art, of the whole to the part.
It is significant that at the same time that individualistic tendencies are recognizable in the sphere of culture, in the other sphere of business and in the interest of profit most men are denied the opportunity of artistic operation altogether, or can function as responsible artists only in hours of leisure when they can pursue a “hobby” or play games. What shall it profit a man to be politically free if he must be either the slave of “art,” or slave of “business”?”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian & Oriental Philosophy of Art Formerly: "Why Exhibit Works of Art?"

“If for some reason creative channels are closed or the ability to find some outlet for the creative drive is blocked, then the course of the drive is deflected and the energy will be turns toward destructive ends: mental illness, alcoholism, drugs, sex, suicide.”
― Carol Ann Beeman, Just This Side of Madness: Creativity and the Drive to Create

“The person who accomplishes his creative goals and excels as an artist is distinguished from equally or more creative peers by the primary attribute drive. It is the inner force of this psychological compulsion not to fame, nor to wealth, but to the compelling images of one’s own mind which sets a person apart as an artist. To succeed where so many try and fail, the creative person must have not only sensitivity, talent, and all the thousand other things we more or less think contribute to artistic accomplishment, but in addition he must deal with the demands of an internal pressure which constantly drives him toward acts of creation.”
― Carol Ann Beeman, Just This Side of Madness: Creativity and the Drive to Create

“For the artist the drive to create is synonymous with the drive to survive and death is its antithesis. But survival without creative recourse in a world of madness or incapacity is synonymous with death.”
― Carol Ann Beeman, Just This Side of Madness: Creativity and the Drive to Create

“I looked again at the heap of quilts. An hour ago they had been patchwork, and nothing more. But now! The old woman's words had wrought a trans formation in the homely mass of calico and silk and worsted. Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.”
― Eliza Calvert Hall, Aunt Jane of Kentucky

“As painters, our brushes are our magic wands, and every room is our canvas. We transform each home into a masterpiece that reflects your dreams and style.
From the colorful streets of Amager to the serene corners of Copenhagen, our passion for painting creates beautiful spaces that invite life and joy. Visit our website to explore our wide range of services and let us paint your next chapter. And if you're seeking inspiration specifically from Amager, check out our page to see how we've transformed some of the most beautiful homes in this area.
Let's paint the stories of our lives, wall by wall.”
― Malermesteren

“Contour and profile ['modinature'] are the touchstone of the architect.
Here he reveals himself as artist or mere engineer.
Contour is free of all restraint.”
― Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture

“It’s a peculiar thing...that the true origin of one’s desire to create, the initial kindling of inspiration, that first generative seed, is always more or less unknown. The source of one’s creativity seems to evade a clear-cut understanding. No clear analysis can be made. It’s too subjective, too multifaceted. An artist can recount their reasons for what might have given them the idea to paint, sing, or write about this thing or that, but it remains a mystery how one person can experience the strange, inexplicable wave that leads to an idea, and then is pushed further by an impulse to pick up a tool and give birth to that idea, while another person, simply, cannot.”
― Nettie Magnan, Dropseed: The Story of Three Sad Women