Top 89 Quotes About Art And Pain
#1. 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
#2. If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?
Ai Weiwei
#3. Loneliness was tough, the toughest role you ever played. Hollywood created a superstar, and pain was the price you paid.
Elton John
#4. Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.
Iris Murdoch
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.
Elie Wiesel
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.
Lois Lowry
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Reality in movies is the reality of the story you're telling, so it may not match the reality as we know it, but the reason there's art is that it tries to bring some kind of understanding of all the suffering and joys and pain that we go through. Storytelling brings some value to it.
Caleb Deschanel
#31. 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
#32. The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.
Ricky Jay
#33. 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
#34. It was an art, and like all arts it demanded mastery, discipline, study. Pain. That too.
George R R Martin
#35. 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
#36. When the music hits, you feel no pain, to quote Bob Marley. But it's true. It's like all art and creation: You're completely in the moment, and you just feel free.
Cory Monteith
#37. I think good art happens on that edge between comfortable and in a lot of pain, you know what I mean?
Liz Phair
#38. 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
#39. Pain s the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.
Seth Godin
#40. I turned my pain into art and my hard work into a career. Helping myself has helped others. helping others has helped me.
Ani DiFranco
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. I'm separated by other performers with whom I might be lumped, since what I say is so intensely personal. I'm anti-art and anti-poetry. As much as possible, I want to inflict my personal pain on the rest of society.
Lydia Lunch
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.
Dean Koontz
#70. The lonesome and desperate kids out there, that pain will translate to magic perhaps.
Tenacious D
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Art comes from joy and pain ... But mostly from pain.
Edvard Munch
#80. 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
#81. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain De Botton
#82. 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
#83. I call it suffering and pain, they call it entertainment.
Ray Davies
#84. [ ... ] 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
