Famous Quotes Ipsum

In the artist's own experience, of course, art is fundamentally indefinable, unsayable; there is something sacred about its demands upon the soul, something inherently mysterious in the forms it takes, no less than its contents. artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. the stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. words mean more than what is set down on paper - it takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning. i would rather be kicked with a foot than be overcome by a loud voice speaking cruel words. if a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as michelangelo painted, or beethoven composed music, or shakespeare composed poetry. he should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well. it's amazing the clarity that comes with psychotic jealousy. there are no mistakes, no coincidences. all events are blessings given to us to learn from. when the morning's freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles give under the strain, the climb seems endless, and suddenly nothing will go quite as you wish - it is then that you must not hesitate. we say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. it never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. for what is it to die / the realization that he was utterly powerless was like the blow of a sledgehammer, yet it was curiously as well. no one was forcing him into a decision. the choice may have been mistaken - the choosing was not. ordinary people believe only in the possible. extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. and by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible. fame lost its appeal for me when i went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door. footfalls echo in the memory / down the passage we did not take / towards the door we never opened / into the rose garden the fact is, i was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the french would say: i was conscious that at moment's mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties and, like any other rebel slave, i felt resolved, in my desperation, to go to all lengths. loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature's delight. when christ said: "i was hungry and you fed me," he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. jesus himself experienced this loneliness. he came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. the same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. every human being in that case resembles christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger. is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? the unexamined life is not worth living. it's like you come onto this planet with a crayon box. now, you may get the 8-pak, or you may get the 16-pak, but it's all in what you do with the crayons--the colors-- that you're given. now don't worry about coloring inside the lines or outside the lines. i say, color outside the lines! color right off the page!.

. Change is an easy panacea. it takes character to stay in one place and be happy there. power consists.... in deciding which stories will be told. weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless. be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. besides, i didn't have anything to fear anymore. maybe all post-suicidals feel that way. it's really great - it gives you a real sense of, not bravery exactly, and not recklessness, quite, but something in between the two. if i'd survived my own best attempts at dying, it probably just wasn't in the cards for me to perish young. to conquer loneliness we shall each have to assume the sacred responsibility of becoming a complete person. and most of all, to define ourselves without always including someone else in the definition. both my wife and daughter think i'm this gigantic loser and they're right.

Art teaches nothing but the significance of life. my first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else, a kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. that still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy. freedom lies in being bold. and may these characters remain / when all is ruin once again what is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from the biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult to come by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become not merely unspoken but unspeakable.... all silence has a meaning. i am woman, hear me roar! the change of life comes when you meet yourself at a crossroads and you decide whether to be honest or not before you die. it takes two to speak truth - one to speak and another to hear. one thing i've learned all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that. a prudent question is one half of wisdom. it isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security. it takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are. there is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear. there must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but i don't know many of them. whenever i'm sad i'm going to die, or so nervous i can't sleep, or in love with somebody i won't be seeing for a week, i slump down just so far and then i say: 'i'll go take a hot bath.' sure, the world is full of trouble. but as long as we have people undoing trouble, we have a pretty good world. as to the way i've spent my money, i think it has done credit to my emotions, and i don't regret it. on occasion, i have calculated things to a very fine point, but you may well cease hoping that i will ever be practical in the accepted sense. i would sooner die. the real voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes - but of having new eyes. you teach what you have to learn. it is not necessary to have achieved perfection to speak of perfection. it is not necessary to have achieved mastery to speak of mastery. it is not necessary to have achieved the highest level of evolution to speak of the highest level of evolution. seek only to be genuine. strive to be sincere. no pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to uncharted land or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting. a memory without a blot of contamination must be an exquisite treasure, an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment horror is shock, a time of utter blindness. horror lacks every hint of beauty. all we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know. neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being..