Nathan Clay > Nathan's Quotes

“Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“Genius is eternal patience. ”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.”
― Leonardo Da Vinci

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.”
― Leonardo Da Vinci

“The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
― Leonardo Da Vinci

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
― Aristotle

“Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.

[Interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 5, 2007]”
― Cormac Mccarthy

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
― Steve Jobs

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“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

“Intellectual passion drives out sensuality. ”
― Leonardo DaVinci