Top 100 Art Pain Quotes
#1. Everything is art,' Tim says, a far-off look suddenly clouding those hazel eyes. 'Death is art. Life is art. Pain is art.
Jen Violi
#2. Lat at nigh have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were mean to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't pain, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.
Steven Pressfield
#3. If we can write or sing or create in some way, even when we are dealing with difficulties or pain, then it becomes something bigger than ourselves - and often beautiful.
Brenda Peterson
#4. After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
Albert Camus
#5. Loneliness was tough, the toughest role you ever played. Hollywood created a superstar, and pain was the price you paid.
Elton John
#6. From personal adversity comes great art
Tan Redding
#7. Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.
Iris Murdoch
#8. This time when she picked up her paints, she didn't think, she just painted. It was like opening the door onto a storm. The canvas was her doorway and the paint all the thunder and lightning, the wild pain-filled sky caught inside her.
Michelle Frost
#10. I knew that my trauma, no matter what it was, was not unique. I knew that pain was the universal driving force of so many people - I knew that only in the details was it specific, and I just found it urgent to cut right to the chase and get right to the point.
Lydia Lunch
#11. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Susan Sontag
#12. Poetry is a storm asking peace to dance with her.
Jenim Dibie
#13. Eloquence is an art of saying things in such a way (1) that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it.
Blaise Pascal
#14. I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.
Yayoi Kusama
#15. But forgiveness ... I'll hold on to that fragile slice of hope and keep it close, remembering that in each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice.
Libba Bray
#16. Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled ... in a unique and inimitable way.
Vladimir Nabokov
#17. I keep breaking things, as if to see what's going on inside of me.
Jenim Dibie
#18. Art is a course in personal development that has no reliable diploma and no known end. The pursuit of art instructs in beauty as well as ugliness, fantasy as well as common sense. Art levels souls and baffles brains. Art softens pain because it is pain. Art gives joy because it is joy.
Robert Genn
#19. Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.
Kenneth Lonergan
#20. Assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.
Robert Adams
#21. Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things; pain is endowed with the same power to bring them into intimate relation with ourselves.
Marcel Proust
#22. It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions.
Sontag, Susan
#23. Art is a place where tragedy meets beauty. An artist is someone who creates the most beautiful things of his life when his soul starts bleeding.
Akshay Vasu
#24. Pain is not a conduit to art or joy
Jay Maisel
#25. A controller doesn't trust his/her ability to live through the pain and chaos of life. There is no life without pain just as there is no art without submitting to chaos.
Rita Mae Brown
#26. We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.
Henry Rollins
#27. A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.
Vladimir Nabokov
#28. Sorrow is humbling. I want my pain to be fabulous. I don't need my pain to be worse than anyone else's; I just want it to be strangely, uniquely mine. Art to someone else's breakdown.
- Thea Hillman, "Dear Kath After"
from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache
Clint Catalyst
#30. I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain.
Anais Nin
#31. Time is in essence separation; separation produces pain; pain poesis; and poesis is what constitutes the unending stream of human life in this world.
Ananya Vajpeyi
#32. All the best parts of art come from pain turned to celebration.
Natalia Kills
#33. What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.
Odilon Redon
#34. Celluloid heroes never feel any pain.
Ray Davies
#35. Illness was admirable training in the creative art of grateful acceptance. Pain accepted was just pain, and heavy, but Harriet believed that pain gladly accepted took wings, went somewhere and did something.
Elizabeth Goudge
#36. You ask me to write you a poem,
I pen you an empty ocean,
You run away.
You ask me who I am,
I paint you a breaking sky,
You weep in the rain.
Jenim Dibie
#37. Talking about abstract things is important. Having big, wild conversations about concepts like art, music, time travel, and dreams makes it much easier when you'll eventually need to talk about things like anger, sadness, pain, and love.
Tom Burns
#38. The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.
Ricky Jay
#39. Be wise as thou art cruel, do not press My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain: Lest sorrow lend me words and words express, The manner of my pity-wanting pain ...
William Shakespeare
#40. I deal with emotional pain through therapy, writing, therapy in music. I think emotional pain is best dealt with when you use art to express it.
Naturi Naughton
#41. I think it's what art should do: make you feel less alone - either in the quest for truth or in dealing with any pain you have.
Brendan Gleeson
#42. It was an art, and like all arts it demanded mastery, discipline, study. Pain. That too.
George R R Martin
#43. Personalized medicine is an art that advocates for the patient, not the pocket or convenience of the medical system.
Melissa Cady
#44. Why should their pain produce such marvelous beauty? he wonders. Or is all beauty created through pain? Is that the secret of great art, both human and Melnibonen?
Michael Moorcock
#45. I think good art happens on that edge between comfortable and in a lot of pain, you know what I mean?
Liz Phair
#47. Entitlement is not a friend of art. Work is. Pain is.
Michael Gungor
#48. Understanding like the eye; whilst it makes us see and perceive all things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own subject.
John Locke
#49. Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain, These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd Make and maintain the balance of the mind.
Alexander Pope
#50. The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain - to just be with it all.
Ram Dass
#51. After life has broken you open, perhaps you may create art
John Geddes
#52. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
#53. I call it suffering and pain, they call it entertainment.
Ray Davies
#54. [ ... ] what Ruskin judged to be the twin purposes of art: to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.
Alain De Botton
#55. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#56. The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts.
Mrinalini Sarabhai
#57. 2 In chapter 3 of The Problem of Pain, Lewis writes, We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
William Shakespeare
#58. As she slid into her fifties, with grace I might add, she learned the art of hatred, pulling on the pain from a broken heart. She kept this pain alive, growing on the outskirts of her soul, like a copse of trees that constantly needed pruning.
Lawren Leo
#59. What's so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven't even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
#60. If you want to help people, if you care, go to the cities. The city is where the pain is the greatest - and the cities are a hell of a lot of fun if you like art, movies and plays.
Frederick Lenz
#61. Effort and pain may not be avoided. Physical and psychological breakdowns occur. The support of a like-minded group, dedicated to The Art of Suffering, provides a safety net. An individual will push harder and risk more in the company of trustworthy peers ...
Mark Twight
#62. The art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.
Joyce Carol Oates
#63. I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.
Christian Wiman
#64. It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain ... A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.
Julia Cameron
#65. Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain.
Till Lindemann
#66. Mientras mas honda la herida,
Es mi canto mas hermoso.
While more deeper is the wound
The more beautiful the art.
Jose Marti
#67. He had learnt how to feign pleasure in a state of pain; how to feign a rosy picture if there was a gloomy affair; how to feign profits when there were losses. And the art of feigning benefited him in his life, at least in business...
Girdhar Joshi
#68. For the choke, there are no "tough guys". With an arm lock he can be tough and resist the pain. With the choke he just passes out, goes to sleep.
Helio Gracie
#69. Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.
John Cusack
#70. Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.
Christina Stead
#71. The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.
Madeleine L'Engle
#72. The Christos-image
is most difficult to disentangle
from its art-craft junk-shop
paint-and-plaster medieval jumble
of pain-worship and death-symbol.
Hilda Doolittle
#73. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#74. In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure ...
Madeleine L'Engle
#75. You can actually take your pain and processes it into some kind of form of art. So I mean, I've easily always been able to do that, but also I've always been able to give myself perspective - or, you know, older people always give you perspective.
Chuck D
#76. Weirdly, an image of Adrian's Love painting came back to me. I thought of the jagged red streak, slashing through the blackness, ripping it
apart. Staring at Jill and her inconsolable pain, I suddenly understood his art a little bit better.
Richelle Mead
#77. Pain, scorned by yonder gout-ridden wretch, endured by yonder dyspeptic in the midst of his dainties, borne bravely by the girl in travail. Slight thou art, if I can bear thee, short thou art if I cannot bear thee!
Seneca The Younger
#78. God, O God, where art thou? Thou art as distant to me as the lady combing rice in the Yunnan Province of China or a piece of floating space debris circling Pegasi. In this feeling-dead world of post traumatic stress, skepticism is king, queen, and court jester.
Chila Woychik
#79. In contrast to modern art, which causes displeasure-modern art, by definition, hurts. In this precise sense, modern art is sublime: it causes pleasure-in-pain, it produces its effect through its own failure, insofar as it refers to the impossible Things.
Slavoj Zizek
#80. But Mousie, thou art no thy lane In proving foresight may be vain The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain For promis'd joy!
Robert Burns
#81. Tragedy is the greatest art form of all. It gives us the courage to continue with our life by exposing us to the pain of life. It is unsentimental, it takes us seriously as human beings, it is not condescending. Paradoxically, by seeing pain we are made greater, it becomes a need.
Howard Barker
#82. The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
Aldo Leopold
#83. Persecution inspires men who otherwise would have remained dormant. As pain whips the painter, his brush whips the canvas.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#84. He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that's what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.
Hannah Harrington
#85. If God could transcribe my heart, it'd still read "I love you".
Jenim Dibie
#86. We crafted everything that hurt us into art.
Jenim Dibie
#87. I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.
Dani Shapiro
#88. Art comes from joy and pain ... But mostly from pain.
Edvard Munch
#89. Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius
Dostoyevsky perhaps.
Larry McMurtry
#90. I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.
Don McCullin
#91. Art - the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
Lawrence Durrell
#92. Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.
Kevin Wilson
#93. There are people who buy pictures because they were difficult to do, and are done. Such pictures are often only a record of pain and dull perseverance. Great works of art should look as though they were made in joy. Real joy is a tremendous activity, dull drudgery is nothing to it.
Robert Henri
#94. Our tragedy is their beauty. Our pain is their art. The beatific bereavement that is our life captured on a canvas for all the world to see.
Solange Nicole
#95. Postural exercises such as yoga, Pilates, Egoscues, Alexander technique and martial arts are about avoiding pain and injury as much as helping you feel good. Attractive men and women have good posture.
Liz Miller
#96. MARCUS ANDRONICUS: Now is a time to storm; why art thou still?
TITUS ANDRONICUS: Ha, ha, ha!
MARCUS ANDRONICUS: Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour.
TITUS ANDRONICUS: Why, I have not another tear to shed:
William Shakespeare
#97. Leibniz mapped the principles concerning the conservation of energy, but nobody has yet scientifically diagrammed the conservation of emotion - have they? How is this subsumed pain vented? Is it released in my art? I hope so, but I also suspect that it's emitted in my sleep.
Keith Murray
#98. It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. I used to believe my art had to be about the things that brought me joy and gave me hope. But I learned that art can be found in all of life, even in pain.
Valentine, while in Italy (pg 267)
Adriana Trigiani
#100. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain De Botton
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