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Artists Quotes

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Artists Quotes

“Politicians, religious leaders, and authorities tell you to trust them because they're the experts with the answers. They make a big show of being trustworthy. That's why I don't trust them. I only trust someone who tells me not to trust them.”

ArtCreativityTrustCreative ProcessPoliticiansArtistsCreative Thinking
Book:Lie like an artist: Communicate successfully by focusing on essential truths
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“Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator. What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances. An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally. That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam. Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expects you to pay him for it. Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.”

ArtPassionChangeWorkCreativityCourageMeaningArtists
Book:Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
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“I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.”

ArtDreamArtistCitiesMusicLonelinessCollegeFriendsLonelyCoffeeAloneCaliforniaMuseumsDreamerFriendFogArtistsSan FranciscoEscapeCityBookstoresAlonenessBohemianMuseumBookstoreTrolleysIndie MusicDreamedTrolleyArt MuseumArt MuseumsDorm
Book:I'll Meet You There
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“Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.”

WritingPhilosophyInspirational QuotesPoetryArtistQuotesLife QuotesMotivational QuotesMovementPoetWords Of WisdomQuoteDancingDancePhilosopherQuote Of The DayAuthorDancerWriterBalletArtistsGymnasticsFigure SkatingRumiChoreographyDance QuotesArtists QuotesBallerinaBallet DancerMotionBallroomTangoDance FloorSalsaDance ClassDance QuoteFreestyleBallroom DanceBallroom DancingWord PornDance LifeIce SkatingTap DanceFlamencoModern DanceMovementsBelly DanceLatin DanceBachataSalsa DanceChoreographerDancing With The StarsDanzaBailaSambaShah Asad RizviBelly DancingDance StudioRaqs SharqiBailandoDance ShoesDance PhotographyFigure SkaterContemporary DanceDance AcademyDance CostumeElectronic DanceJazz DanceKathakReggae DanceStreet DanceZoukBelly DancerBhangraBoogie WoogieDance WearDancehall DanceDisco DanceDisco DancingFolk DanceMamboReggaetonSwaySwing DanceZumba DanceKizombaDance FestivalDance Show
Author:Shah Asad Rizvi
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“Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.”

WritingPhilosophyInspirational QuotesPoetryArtistQuotesLife QuotesMotivational QuotesMovementPoetWords Of WisdomQuoteDancingDancePhilosopherQuote Of The DayAuthorDancerWriterBalletArtistsGymnasticsFigure SkatingRumiChoreographyDance QuotesArtists QuotesBallerinaBallet DancerMotionBallroomTangoDance FloorSalsaDance ClassDance QuoteFreestyleBallroom DanceBallroom DancingWord PornDance LifeIce SkatingTap DanceFlamencoModern DanceMovementsBelly DanceLatin DanceBachataSalsa DanceChoreographerDanzaBailaSambaShah Asad RizviBelly DancingDance StudioRaqs SharqiBailandoDance ShoesDance PhotographyFigure SkaterContemporary DanceDance AcademyDance CostumeElectronic DanceJazz DanceKathakReggae DanceStreet DanceZoukBelly DancerBhangraBoogie WoogieDance WearDancehall DanceDisco DanceDisco DancingFolk DanceMamboReggaetonSwaySwing DanceZumba DanceKizombaDance FestivalDance Show
Author:Shah Asad Rizvi
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“Life is an affair of mystery; shared with companions of music, dance and poetry.”

WritingPhilosophyInspirational QuotesPoetryArtistQuotesLife QuotesMotivational QuotesMovementPoetWords Of WisdomQuoteDancingDancePhilosopherQuote Of The DayAuthorDancerWriterBalletArtistsGymnasticsFigure SkatingRumiChoreographyDance QuotesArtists QuotesBallerinaBallet DancerMotionBallroomTangoDance FloorSalsaDance ClassDance QuoteFreestyleBallroom DanceBallroom DancingWord PornDance LifeIce SkatingTap DanceFlamencoModern DanceMovementsBelly DanceLatin DanceBachataSalsa DanceChoreographerDanzaBailaSambaShah Asad RizviBelly DancingDance StudioRaqs SharqiBailandoDance ShoesDance PhotographyFigure SkaterContemporary DanceDance AcademyDance CostumeElectronic DanceJazz DanceKathakReggae DanceStreet DanceZoukBelly DancerBhangraBoogie WoogieDance WearDancehall DanceDisco DanceDisco DancingFolk DanceMamboReggaetonSwaySwing DanceZumba DanceKizombaDance FestivalDance Show
Author:Shah Asad Rizvi
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“Now is not the time for bigots and racists. No time for sexists and homophobes. Now, more than ever, is the time for ARTISTS. It’s time for us to rise above and to create. To show humanity. To spread hope. We must prevent society from destroying itself, from losing its way. Now is the time for love.”

LoveArtDreamTogetherDesireTimeFaithHumanityHopeBeliefWishPeaceCommunityLove QuotesVisionCreativityCreativeSocietyAchievePoetPromiseAmbitionRacismHumanOptimismHarmonyElectionUnityBelieverPainterOptimisticOnenessAuthorDancerWriterHopefulMinoritiesRacistLgbtBigotrySexismDestroyingLgbtqAspireLoverHope QuotesArtistsCreateOne LoveTogethernessKamandKojouriKamand KojouriHomophobiaRiseSexistDestroyUnionLovedPeacefulnessHumannessHomophobicHopefulnessSongwriterSingerMinorityLove Is LoveBigotElection ResultsHomophobeSculptorLove Trumps Hate
Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are. I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.”

LifeWritingArtSpiritualityGrowthEmotionWritersArtistsRevelation
Author:James Baldwin
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“It is always as it was between Achilles and Homer: one person has the experience, the sensation, the other describes it. A real writer only gives words to the affects and experiences of others; he is an artist in divining a great deal from the little that he has felt. Artist are by no means people of great passion, but they frequently present themselves as such, unconsciously sensing that others give greater credence to the passions they portray if the artist's own life testifies to his experience in this area. We need only let ourselves go, not control ourselves, give free play to our wrath or our desire, and the whole world immediately cries: how passionate he is! But there really is something significant in a deeply gnawing passion that consumes and often swallows up an individual: whoever experiences this surely does not describe it in dramas, music, or novels. Artists are frequently unbridled individuals, insofar, that is, as they are not artists: but that is something different.”

ArtArtistPassionImaginationExperienceWritersConfusingArtistsAchillesHomerArt Theory
Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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“Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time.”

ArtImaginationFreedomArtists
Book:Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
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“There's something about the candle snuffed out prematurely that captures our imagination—it is the thought, perhaps, of the books and paintings and songs that might've been, or the idea that artists simply burn too bright for this world.”

LifeArtDeathImaginationArtistsFragility Of Human Life
Book:Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
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“The love of artists or mystics is often "artificial." Because they find beauty in thought alone, intimacy in invention, or ecstasy in silence. They love whom they choose, not whom the outer world permits. Because they do not carry the outer world within their inner world; rather, it is their inner world that holds power over the external one. Therefore, they do not love the person presented by the outer world but the one portrayed by their inner world. And that is not the person’s "real" self. Therefore, they do not love the person presented by the outer world but the one presented by their own inner world. And that is not the person’s "real" self, but an "imagined" version of them.”

LoveRomanceImaginationPerspectiveArtistsInner WorldMysticsExternal WorldSovereignityArtifical
Author:Sov8840
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“...invent your own future and profit from it...part of the reason artists can predict societal changes, spot unseen trends, and connect invisible dots is because they can imagine new possibilities, different worlds, and alternative futures.”

ImaginationCreativityInnovationArtistsCreative ThinkingCreative Intelligence
Book:How Creativity Rules the World: The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas into Gold
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“In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those days for a single performance in Jackson's Century Theatre. Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists - toward the transience as much as the artists. I must have seen "Acrobats in a Park" at the time I wrote the story as exotic, free of any experience as I knew it. At the center of the little story is the Zorro's act: the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that holds together, interlocked, and stands like a wall. Writing about the family act, I was writing about the family itself, its strength as a unit, testing its frailty under stress. I treated it in an artificial and oddly formal way; the stronghold of the family is put on view as a structure built each night; on the night before the story opens, the Wall has come down when the most vulnerable member slips, and the act is done for. But from various points within it and from outside it, I've been writing about the structure of the family in stories and novels ever since. In spite of my uncompromising approach to it, my fundamental story form might have been trying to announce itself to me.”

WritingImaginationFamilyStrengthVulnerableArtistsTransientFrailty
Book:On Writing
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“Practical affairs task the human brain throughout the day. At night, the mind takes a deserved hiatus to consider the impossible and the absurd. In the carnage of our nighttime sleep tussles, the colored liqueurs of the true, the possible, fantasy, and the mythic beliefs become intermixed. Eyelets of the commonsensical and the imaginative are incorporated, and a new realism emerges out of our distilled perception of the veridical derived from the phenomenal realm of sensory reality and the philosophic world of ideals contained in the noumenal realm. The resultant psychobiologic vision immerses us in bouts of intoxicating inspiration and artistic stimulation and leaves us rickety boned and weakened after enduring a dreaded hangover of perpetual doubt laced with vagueness and insecurity.”

ArtArtistImaginationVisionCreativeImagineDreamsSelf DiscoveryAbsurdWritersCreative ProcessSelf KnowledgeDreams QuotesWriters On WritingWriting ProcessArtistsKnow ThyselfMemoir WritingImagination QuotesSelf DoubtSelf KnowingPersonal EssaysEssayistAbsurdismArtistic VisionJourney Of Self DiscoverySelf Knowledge QuotesArtistic InspirationEssay WritingNarrative WritingWriters VoiceSelf TruthMythicJourney Of The MindJourney Of BecomingJourney Of The SoulDream InspirationalCreativity ProcessArtistic Imagination
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“The human mind’s innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being.”

MindSelfChangeImaginationIdentityPersonalityTransformationSelf AwarenessArtisticHuman MindArtistsMetamorphosisSelf Awareness QuotesSelf IdentityIdentity CrisisPersonality DevelopmentTransformation QuotesSelf Creation
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings.”

WritingArtImaginationCreativityCreative ProcessWriting ProcessArtistsCreative WritingCreative ThinkingCreative MindMemory And Imagination
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Normality seemed suspicious to him. He avoided smart routes, healthy decisions, and standard trajectories. Andrei fancied the forsaken, the dreadful, the dusty. He intentionally said yes to what other people said no to. "There must be something worthwhile," he always thought, "in the apparently worthless, seemingly dangerous, and painfully obvious.”

LifeInspirationFreedomSocietyIndividualityOriginalityUniquenessArtistsNormalityMonotony
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“I also often ask my guests about what they consider to be their invisible weaknesses and shortcomings. I do this because these are the characteristics that define us no less than our strengths. What we feel sets us apart from other people is often the thing that shapes us as individuals. This may be especially true of writers and actors, many of whom first started to develop their observational skills as a result of being sidelined from typical childhood or adolescent activities because of an infirmity or a feeling of not fitting in. Or so I’ve come to believe from talking to so many writers and actors over the years.”

ActorsLonelinessSelf AwarenessIndividualityPersonal DevelopmentJournalismInterviewsWritersIntrospectionArtistsShortcomingsChildhood TraumaInterviewWeaknessesDefining MomentsInterviewingOutcastsNot Fitting InDefining YourselfWhat Makes Us Who We AreWhat Shapes Us
Book:All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists
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“The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.”

ArtPassionWorkCommitmentConformityJobDedicationWorkplaceArtistsNonconformityLinchpin
Book:Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
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“I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?”

ArtPhilosophyHumorFunnyCreativityFoodHumourPhilosophicalCookingPhilosophy Of LifeMeatArtistsPracticalityGadflyOvenArtsyBeing PracticalKeep Your Feet On The Ground
Book:Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
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“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." [Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]”

ArtDoubtSelf EsteemGreatnessHumilityConfidenceFameDepressionSelf AwarenessInsecurityCreative ProcessNarcissismIntrospectionGreat ArtArtistsGreat ArtistSelf DoubtSelf DelusionCezanneFame And FortuneSelf Esteem Or Lack ThereofDepression HumorSelf DoubtsPaul Cezanne
Author:Robert Hughes
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“It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.”

ArtPoliticsCreativityRevolutionFameCapitalismEntertainmentArtistsConsuemrism
Book:The Shock of the New
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“Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. In other years I had felt that as a newspaper artist I was a member of a profession which enjoyed important privileges and in which a man might possibly rise to fame and fortune. But I saw now that everyone who did productive work of any kind was at the mercy of those who employed him. They could make or break him whenever they so willed...I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why.”

FameWorkersPrivilegeArtistsClass StruggleNewspaper
Book:Art Young: His Life and Times
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“Whenever we come across a famous painting by an acclaimed artist, we tend to reason with ourselves. That it ought to be good, for everyone thinks highly of it. But had we not known who the artist was, we wouldn’t have appreciated the work that much. We don’t know whom this society and the media would put on a pedestal next. It could very well be you.”

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Book:The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit
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“Every great athlete, artist and aspiring being has a great team to help them flourish and succeed - personally and professionally. Even the so-called 'solo star' has a strong supporting cast helping them shine, thrive and take flight.”

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Author:Rasheed Ogunlaru
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“Another female star of the pre-modern age was “Mulla Fatemeh” Naghai, a performer of music and poetry for the Zand dynasty court in Shiraz during the 1700s. This woman gave public concerts outside the Vakil bazaar, playing the lute, harp, tambourine, and reed pipe, and she could recite over 20,000 verses of classical or contemporary poetry from memory. She was an outspoken critic of clerical hypocrisy and of bigotry in general, demanding justice for the powerless both in the court and on stage.”

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Book:Mother Persia: Women in Iran's History
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“So the Dark did a simple thing," he said. "They showed the maker of the sword his own uncertainty and fear. Fear of having done the wrong thing--fear that having done this one great thing, he would never again be able to accomplish anything of great worth--fear of age, of insufficiency, of unmet promise. All such endless fears, that are the doom of people given the gift of making, and lie always somewhere in their minds.”

EvilFearDarkAnxietyUncertaintyMakersArtistsArtisansMaking
Book:Silver on the Tree
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“Every artist loved their art for the same reason, and this caused no suspicion to the world. They regularly say: 'My field captures the human experience.' 'And what is the human experience to you exactly?' questions O’Hare. 'I want to be a storyteller who inspires and expresses their imagination.' 'But how does your chosen art differ from other mediums?' questions O’Hare. 'I am a quiet observer who innately loves philosophy.' But here you are screaming this in a room, cries Dr. O’Hare. 'I am beyond grateful for the people I’ve worked with who made this the greatest collaboration I could have ever asked for.' 'But how did you collaborate—with thought and rehearsal?—or did you just perform some damn thing and sign both your names on it?' asked O’Hare.”

ArtLyingHumanityActorsLanguageWorkSadnessSocietyWritersArtists
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“He frowned with difficulty at everyone’s quick transition. He felt something crack in the room. It was like the feeling an artist got when he closed up his gallery, walked upstairs to his living quarters, and stared at the window to watch his former crowd rush to party next door and forget his exhibition one martini at a time. It was like goodbye. There was an unsaid, incomprehensive quality of unfairness to endings. They lacked a transition. The guitarist’s identity, for example, was in her strumming ten seconds ago, not when she finished and looked up at the seduced crowd as “her” again. The singer’s heart was housed in his lyrics, not in his thick-accented voice that rooms never understood.”

LifeArtSadnessLonelinessSingersGoodbyeArtistsEndingsGoodbyesMusicians
Book:A Happy Ghost
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