Art, Talent, Poetry, Imagination, Creativity, Passion

An Art is anything done so well that it takes on more than ordinary significance.

Any talent you may have is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. (Stella Adler)

Art is Man's nature. Nature is God's art. (James Bailey)

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" (Howard Ikemoto)

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie. (Agnes de Mille)

Dance is the hidden language of the soul. (Martha Graham

Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can. (Owen Meredith)

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. (Pablo Picasso)

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. (John W. Gardner)

When you hear a voice inside you say 'you cannot paint' then by all means paint, and the voice will be silenced. (Vincent Van Gogh)

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. (Wallace Stevens)

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. (Andre Gide)

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. (Scott Adams)

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. (Tom Stoppard)

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. (Pablo Picasso)

Poetry should... strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance. (John Keats)

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint you can on it. (Danny Kaye)

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. (Emile Zola)

The poet's fate is here in emblem shown,

He asked for bread and he received a stone.

(Samuel Wesley, "On Butler's Monument")

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. (Salvador Dali)

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid. (Jules Feiffer)

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I have... a terrible need... shall I say the word?... of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars. (Vincent van Gogh)

A good painter need not give a name to his picture, a bad one must. (Polish Proverb)

PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic. (Ambrose Bierce)

The world is but a canvas to the imagination. (Henry David Thoreau)

Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion. (Martha Graham)

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. (Steve Martin)

God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He just goes on trying other things. (Pablo Picasso)

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business. (Mikhail Baryshnikov)

Do it big, do it right and do it with style. (Fred Astaire)

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul. (Vincent Van Gogh)

The very impulse to write, I think, springs from an inner chaos crying out for order, for meaning, and that meaning must be discovered in the process of writing or the work lies dead as it is finished. (Arthur Miller)

Life is Pain, Highness

Buttercup: You mock my pain!

Dread Pirate Roberts: Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

The only pain in pleasure is the pleasure of the pain. (Anne Rice)

Whatever brings you the most joy will also probably bring you the most pain. Always a price to pay. (Alice Hoffman)

How delicious is pleasure after torment! (Pierre Corneille)

The first thing we become convinced of is that man is organized so as to be far more sensible of pain than of pleasure. (Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin)

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully. (Max Eastman)

It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys. (Emil Zatopek)

I think that passion and love and pain are all bearable, and they go to make love beautiful. (Robert Plant)

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love. (Honore De Balzac)

The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you. (Tony Robbins)

After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs. (Emily Dickinson)

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt. (Erma Bombeck)

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment. (Emile M. Cioran)

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. (Carl Jung)

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain. (William Faulkner)

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it! (Charlie Chaplin)

I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine. (Henry Rollins)

Sensual excess drives out pity in man. (Marquis de Sade)

There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience. (Marquis de Sade)

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain. (Lord Byron)

To give and receive love, you have to be in touch with pain, you have to be capable of provoking it and feeling it. (Jeanne Moreau)

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

Suffering cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy. (Gandhi)

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love. (Mother Teresa)

My pain may be the reason for somebody's laugh. But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody's pain. (Charlie Chaplin)

Unfortunately, sometimes people don't hear you until you scream. (Stefanie Powers)

The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men. (Jacob Bronowski)

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. (Carl Gustav Jung)

Nothing that can be said can begin to take away the anguish and pain of these moments. Grief is the price we pay for love. (Elizabeth II)

Scars have the power to remind us that our past is real. (Cormac McCarthy)

Anger and agony
Are better than misery
Trust me, I've got a plan
When the lights go off, you will understand
Pain, without love
Pain, I can't get enough
Pain, I like it rough
'Cause I'd rather feel pain than nothing at all
  (Pain, Three Days Grace)

All the World's a Stage

All the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts. (William Shakespeare - As You Like It)

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. (Oscar Wilde)

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. (Stella Adler)

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists. (Stephen Sondheim)

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience. (Andy Goldsworthy)

Film is fragmented and gets into lots of other people's hands. There are a lot of pleasures that theatre gives me. You get to perform uninterrupted. (Willem Dafoe)

The best audience is one that is intelligent, well educated - and a little drunk. (Vice President Alben W. Barkley)

My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive. (Gwyneth Paltrow)

The reason why I hate working in theatre is the tedium of memorization. But once that is done, then you feast on this never-ending meal. If you play it correctly, every night is fraught with very high stakes that are very difficult to find in everyday life. (Christopher Meloni)

I think theatre is by far the most rewarding experience for an actor. You get 4 weeks to rehearse your character and then at 7:30 pm you start acting and nobody stops you, acting with your entire soul. (Christopher Eccleston)

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession. (Katherine Hepburn)

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed. (Edward Bond)

With a theatre audience there's always the additional sense of a sustained challenge of which I'm acutely aware and for which you need to have the tools ready - your voice, physicality, brain. (Greta Scacchi)

What draws me to the theatre... is that you have no idea what's going to happen. That's the most exciting part of theatre, it's never the same. If it were, it would be like watching a movie. (Lusia Strus)

For me, making films is like being on vacation, it's a nice walk. But theatre is like mountaineering: you never know whether you're going to fall off or make it to the top. (Isabelle Huppert)

Acting is the easiest money you'll ever make in your life, and directing is probably the hardest money. (Charles S. Dutton)

Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. You're doing the same thing: You're reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, that's exactly like people I know. (Jonathan Miller)

Casting is 65 percent of directing. (John Frankenheimer)

Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots. (John Crowley)

I am drawn to writing and directing as it is most like the feeling I had when I was a teenager with my puppet theatre. You are more in control of everything and involved in every aspect of production, so more challenged and fulfilled. (Richard E. Grant)

I mean, if you are directing actors to do one thing and then directing them to do something else entirely because the one thing you wanted them to do may not work, then you are just shattering their confidence in the project. (Atom Egoyan)

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it. (John Huston)

The more decisions you make, the better, statistically, your odds of success are. And what I also learned was, it doesn't matter: anything can be fixed. When you're directing, you can agonize, but you can't indulge. Stuff has to happen. (Tony Goldwyn)

Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four. (Katherine Hepburn)

Well, actors get very frustrated with giving control to other people. They have their own ideas and wants for their characters. Warren Beatty once told me that he thought actors ended up directing out of frustration. If you have a strong sense of how to communicate a film, you should direct. The problem is that it is a huge commitment. I'd rather direct a play than a film due to the time. A movie can tie you up for a year or more. (Alec Baldwin)

You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows. (Louis Malle)

I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance. (Sam Mendes)

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. (Billy Wilder)

We're tightrope walkers. When you walk the wire in a movie, the wire is painted on the floor, but when you walk it on the stage, it's a hundred feet high without a net. (Al Pacino)

Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult. (Laurence Olivier)

It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true. (Woodrow Wilson, on seeing D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation)