Top 100 Irving Stone Quotes
#1. Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#2. It was only a remote portion of his mind that heard and answered the girl. The rest of him was soaking up her beauty with the passionate thirst of a man who has drunk too long at a celibate well.
Irving Stone
#3. I paint only what I love.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#4. A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.
Irving Stone
#5. The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.
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#7. No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.
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#8. Inside yourself you're strong. That's the place where strength counts. Strength shows not only in how fast you can chop down trees.' -p. 5
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#9. Watercolor is not my way of expression.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#10. A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings.
Irving Stone
#11. Perhaps you could not find such godless, such ruthless and such materialist people as clergy.
Irving Stone
#12. He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.
Irving Stone
#13. To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.
Irving Stone
#14. His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap
Irving Stone
#15. When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears
I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block.
Irving Stone
#16. You cannot be the good all the time - sometimes it is necessary to get angry.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#17. The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.
Irving Stone
#18. I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I'm writing about.
Irving Stone
#19. One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.
Irving Stone
#20. Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.
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#21. An empty stomach is better than full and grief is better than happiness.
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#23. Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.
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#24. It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.
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#25. As he reached the door of the chapel and turned back for a last look, he saw that the Virgin too was sad and lonely; the most alone human being God ever put on earth.
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#26. Wherever at least two art lovers meet, Vincent Van Gogh's name is holy.
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#27. Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.
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#28. An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.
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#29. There is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris.
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#30. I will be an artist. I am sure I will. [Vincent Van Gogh]
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#31. Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only - he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.
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#32. When I compare myself to the other fellows there is something stiff and awkward about me; I look as if I had been in prison for ten years.
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#33. I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn't I would never write anything else.
Irving Stone
#34. After all, the life itself shows a completely useless, hopeless and indifferent blank face, a deduction of no more than a blank canvas.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
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#35. Have you ever been in love?"
"...in a way."
"It's always 'in a way.
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#36. Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he'd do the same thing.
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#40. That horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.
Irving Stone
#41. I wanted the figures to be real and believable so that you would feel that with their very next breath would begin life itself.
Irving Stone
#42. How can a young person learn whether he chose the correct way? He thinks he has a special idea, and then he discovers that he is completely inappropriate for it.
Irving Stone
#43. Man's spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food ...
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#44. Loneliness is a kind of prison.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
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#45. Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]
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#46. I was thinking that Rembrandt would have like to paint you.
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#47. Pleasure is one of the most important things in life, as important as food or drink.
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#48. There is no thrill of mortal danger to surpass that of a lone man trying to create something that never existed before.
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#49. The writer ... an athlete required to break the four-minute mile every morning.
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#51. An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.
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#52. Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.
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#53. Who loves - lives, who lives - works, and who works has some bread.
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#54. I can not draw sheep and cows if I do not understand their lives.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
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#55. The simplest things that need self-restraint are the most difficult to replicate.
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#56. There seemed to be that same fierce quest after truth, the same unafraid penetration, the same feeling that character is beauty, no matter how sordid it may appear.
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#57. Misery is the only thing in the world that has no end or edge.
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#58. No one has called any of my pictures obscene ever but I have been constantly blamed for an even greater sin - the ugliness.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
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#59. We ... believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.
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#60. I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.
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#61. 'Tell me, please,' Van Gogh asked, 'is it justifiable that a person wastes his only life by selling worthless paintings for fools?
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#62. He had always loved God. In his darkest hours he cried out, God did not create us to abandon us.
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#63. Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality.
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#64. The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.
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#65. We are all are cripples in some way.
[Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec]
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#66. It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
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#67. You know, Nabby, there's mighty few pleasures in life to equal doing one's job. It is an act of love ... -p. 131
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#69. A canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.
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#70. The artist has the liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours.
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#71. God is imagined as a rich, old gentleman who is very happy that things are going so smooth here on Earth that he had created.
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#72. My goal always is to tell a universal story, meaning it's about a person who has an idea, a vision, a dream, an ambition to make the world somewhat less chaotic.
Irving Stone
#73. Many times in your life you may think you are failing, but ultimately you will express yourself and that expression will justify your life.
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#74. Diligence does not work if there is a lack of innate talent.
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#76. He was a victim of his own integrity, which forced him to do his best, even when he would have preferred to do nothing at all.
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#77. And rout the magical mystical moonlight with fierce proof of its own greater power to light, to heat, to make everything known.
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#79. From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud's fiance after he teased her for being sweet, Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.
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#80. An impressionist is the one who does not paint like everyone, does not obey the rules and attitude.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
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#81. There are neither good nor evil, only the existence and action.
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#82. Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.
Irving Stone
#83. It's not macho to read? Nonsense. Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-itness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home run, a slamdunk, or breaking the four-minute mile.
Irving Stone
#84. There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.
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#85. What we know of others is our personal secret.
Irving Stone
#86. Vincent did not know how to express his feelings in words. He knew how to paint them.
However, one cannot paint the farewell.
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#87. Is an artist only the one whose paintings are purchased? I think that an artist is a man who always seeks and never finds a final answer.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
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#88. Every man must settle down once in a lifetime.
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#89. He made his colours, built his stretchers, plastered his canvas, painted his pictures, carpentered his frames, and painted them. 'Too bad I can't buy my own pictures,' he murmured aloud. 'Then I'd be completely self-sufficient.'
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#90. You cannot be firmly certain about anything. You can only have enough courage and strength to do what you consider to be right. Maybe it turns out that was wrong, but still you would have done his, and it is most important.
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#91. He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.
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#92. Cardinal Giovanni still did not like delicate matters; they were usually painful.
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#93. The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.
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#94. Even if there is endless documentation, it would be impossible to know what a man thought inside his own mind ... This is where the novelist's creative imagination has to take over.
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#95. The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.
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#96. The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.
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#97. No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him.
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#98. If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itelf with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries.
Irving Stone
#99. How could he have been so stupid, so blind? David pictured after Goliath could be no one but the biblical David, a special individual. He was not content to portray one man; he was seeking universal man, Everyman, all of whom,from the beginning of time,
had faced a decision to strike for freedom
Irving Stone
#100. Everyone has their own personality, its own character, and if he respects that, everything would finally fall over for good only.
Irving Stone
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