Top 100 Pain Art Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.
Marilyn Manson
#4. Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It's rage, it's creativity, it's pain, it's hurt, but it's the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.
Kanye West
#5. 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
#6. Persecution inspires men who otherwise would have remained dormant. As pain whips the painter, his brush whips the canvas.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#7. My heart shattered. 'The boy that you keep painting - the one at the warehouse and at the art gallery? That boy is you, isn't it?'
Rider didn't say anything.
'It's not you from the past,' I whispered. His handsome face blurred. 'That's still who you are.'
He closed his eyes.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#8. Don't focus on the pain in the world, focus on what will keep you sane in the world.
Art Hochberg
#9. 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
#10. If God could transcribe my heart, it'd still read "I love you".
Jenim Dibie
#11. We crafted everything that hurt us into art.
Jenim Dibie
#12. 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
#13. Art comes from joy and pain ... But mostly from pain.
Edvard Munch
#14. I think joy is just as instructive as pain, and I like it better. I never meant to suffer any more than I could help; my nature was meant for happiness, a daylight art and living.
Katherine Anne Porter
#15. 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
#16. Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.
Dean Koontz
#17. The lonesome and desperate kids out there, that pain will translate to magic perhaps.
Tenacious D
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. As in art, poetry, music, etc., the best theology is worked out in pain
Steve Chalke
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. It's an art to live with pain ... mix the light into gray.
Eddie Vedder
#25. No matter what is happening in life or in the world - war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones - if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.
Karen DeCrow
#26. What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
Lionel Trilling
#27. Architecture is a subtle and difficult art. It needs dedication and involves pain. Being able 'to architect' is not a capacity that can be developed to sophisticated levels quickly and easily.
Simon Unwin
#28. Pain is not a conduit to art or joy
Jay Maisel
#29. Every once in awhile, have a really good argument with yourself. I mean really get pissed off. Take both sides. Then look in the mirror, and in the middle of the argument say, "You know, you're a pain in my butt. I'm not arguing with you. Get lost.
Art Hochberg
#30. Comedy and tragedy are basically the same thing. Comedy is just the art of making light of life's sufferings. Turning all your pain into a joke.
Katie Kacvinsky
#31. 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
#32. I keep breaking things, as if to see what's going on inside of me.
Jenim Dibie
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Sometimes it seems like "pain" is too obvious a place to turn for inspiration. Pain isn't always deep, anyway. Sometimes it's awful and that's it. Or boring. Surely other things can be as profound as pain.
Ellen Forney
#40. 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
#41. I remember the Inquisition, when pain in service to the church was raised to an art form.
James Rollins
#42. 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
#43. the art of life, mostly, the art of avoiding pain
Henri Cole
#44. We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.
Henry Rollins
#45. 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
#46. Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius
Dostoyevsky perhaps.
Larry McMurtry
#47. I've perfected the art of the fake smile. It's not so difficult when you are completely numb.
Bethany Griffin
#48. Paint what you know, especially if it looks like something you shouldn't know.
Andrew Levy
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful.
Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me.
Nikki Rowe
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
#56. Mientras mas honda la herida,
Es mi canto mas hermoso.
While more deeper is the wound
The more beautiful the art.
Jose Marti
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Pain is the best instructor, but no one wants to go to his class.
Choi Hong Hi
#61. 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
#62. After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.
Osamu Dazai
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#66. My art is largely made up of my pain; re-framed, redesigned and re-purposed. It's a mutually beneficial experience for both the creator and the beholder. Transformative healing is a beautiful process.
Jaeda DeWalt
#67. I just wished they'd see Mari, their daughter. I wished they saw how much I liked art and how much I didn't want to dedicate my life to something I wasn't passionate about.
H.M. Ward
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Don't be afraid," he said. "Art is full of agony and beauty. The pen itself a sword of pleasure and pain, isn't it, my poet?
Lisa Carlisle
#71. The thing is we can't be attached to anything we've experienced up to this point in our life - any person, any situation, any outcomes, any happiness, any pain - any of it.
Art Hochberg
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Don't forget that in the midst of all your pain and heartache, you are surrounded by beauty, the wonder of creation, art, your music and culture, the sounds of laughter and love, of whispered hopes and celebrations, of new life and transformation, of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Wm. Paul Young
#75. Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.
Kanye West
#76. Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
T. S. Eliot
#77. Some seek
solace in
whiskey,
I drown my
sorrows
in ink.
Noor Shirazie
#78. 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
#79. The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain, said Lord Byron,
Shirley Jackson
#80. When Black and White are colors and not races, people will still fall in love and discriminate between partners and feel sad and bad and need art that breaks your heart and takes you to those places where pain becomes beauty.
Marlene Dumas
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.
Wassily Kandinsky
#86. I envy the poet. He is encouraged toward drunkenness and wallows with nubile wenches while the painter must endure wretchedness and pain for his art.
Rembrandt
#87. 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
#88. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain De Botton
#89. 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
#90. I call it suffering and pain, they call it entertainment.
Ray Davies
#91. [ ... ] 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Dance with the sufis, celebrate your top ten in the charts of pain.
Tori Amos
#99. 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
#100. 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
