Shell McConville > Shell's Quotes

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“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 sun”
― Pablo Picasso

“Creativity takes courage. ”
― Henri Matisse

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
― Edgar Degas

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
― Martha Graham

“Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
― Albert Camus

“Art is the proper task of life. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.”
― Pablo Picasso

“What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.”
― Donald E. Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Volume 136)

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ”
― Susan Sontag

“If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”
― Orson Welles

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others”
― Martha Graham

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
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― Eugene Delacroix

“Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.”
― E. M. Forster

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.”
― Ezra Pound

“We work in the dark - we do what we can - 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, The Middle Years