Top 100 Spectator Quotes
#1. I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.
J.G. Ballard
#2. From the moment you become a spectator, everything is downhill. It is a life that ends before the cheering and the shouting die.
George Sheehan
#3. At lucky moments this emanation could overwhelm the spectator in such a way, that because of all sorts of associations in his thinking, he could finally be taken to those areas which also had moved me so deeply and made me think I should draw the attention of others to it.
Antoni Tapies
#4. People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasonably - they really got bashed.
Marge Piercy
#5. Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life.
Jackie Robinson
#6. Gambling houses are temples where the most sordid and turbulent passions contend; there no spectator can be indifferent. A card or a small square of ivory interests more than the loss of an empire, or the ruin of an unoffending group of infants, and their nearest relatives.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#7. Will an intelligent spectator not admire the prodigeous structures of Stone-Henge because he does not know by what law of mechanics they were raised?
Elizabeth Montagu
#8. I Chose to be an active participant in my life rather than a spectator.
Robin McGraw
#9. Be the player in your own dream life. Don't be a spectator watching your dreams every day; Let them get going!
Israelmore Ayivor
#10. I could not have climbed any mountains while looking from the ground ... I would not have flown ... or dived ... or surfed ... or swum ... I am not a tourist nor a spectator ... this is the life I have left, and I will not waste it like some rubber-neck
Kem
#11. Beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who screams is not a dancing bear.
Aime Cesaire
#12. You cannot say, 'Go! Go! Rah! Rah! Good move!' People want some emotion. Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.
Garry Kasparov
#13. There are so many wizards of the computer, stock market, test tube, and spectator sport, but so few of the art of life.
Mantak Chia
#14. As a spectator I witnessed the applause given to the performer, so I decided to be the performer.
Amit Kalantri
#15. Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.
Derek Landy
#16. I think my younger self would be more amazed to know I was doing an interview for 'The Spectator.'
Gary Kemp
#17. I watch fights and I often feel morally compromised by it. I feel like I'm morally culpable for what's occurring because I'm the spectator and ultimately footing the bill for the spectacle.
Jonathan Gottschall
#18. Live life as an observer but not a spectator. Learn the rules, get in the game, break some rules. Live. Experience. There is no exhilaration to be achieved sitting on the bench.
Michael Holbrook
#19. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
Barnett Newman
#20. My favourite spectator sport is watching people who should know better searching for something (and often claiming to find it) where it never could be. Women claiming to find feminism in Islam is a good one.
Julie Burchill
#21. Anything can happen to change your life at any moment. Live life to the fullest. Do not be a spectator in your life be a player.
Julie Campbell
#22. There's something that happens in that delivery room, when a woman becomes ten times more a woman, and a guy becomes six times less a man. You feel really dopey and useless and like a spectator. I did, anyway.
Paul Reiser
#24. The sight of a being who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator. Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant
#25. Ideally there is a type of continuum which flows from life through the artist's sensibility and his materials ... the concreteness of the object and its own life , through the spectator, with his expectations, interpretations, back into life.
Douglas Portway
#27. The process of drawing is ... the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of visual thought. Unlike painting and sculpture ... the artist makes clear to himself and not to the spectator what he is doing. It is a soliloquy before it becomes communication.
Michael Ayrton
#28. Out of the blending of human and animal stories comes the theme that I hope is inherent in all my books: that man is an inescapable part of all nature, that its welfare is his welfare, that to survive, he cannot continue acting and regarding himself as a spectator looking on from somewhere outside.
Fred Bodsworth
#29. Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator.
Paulo Freire
#30. All that a spectator gets out of the game is fresh air, the comical articles in his program, the sight of twenty-two young men rushing about in mysterious formations, and whatever he brought in his flask.
Robert Benchley
#31. In the actual condition of medical science, the physician mostly plays the part of simple spectator of the sad episodes which his profession furnishes him.
Francois Magendie
#32. People tell me, "I'm glad you said that." But this is not a spectator sport. This is an activity that requires daily moral awakening as well as a commitment that leads to real change.
Bill Bradley
#33. The way the knowledge of the spectator is drawn upon in constructing the scene, through the stylized performance, ritual motifs and auditory address that arise from a host of Indian aesthetic and performance traditions.
Anonymous
#34. At festivals there's always one spectator from Egypt who says, 'I like it, it moved me, reminds me of so many things.' I get a lot of reaction from the Arab world at fests. But the percentage of people from the Arab world who like it should be the same as anywhere else.
Eran Kolirin
#35. In life, be a participant, not a spectator.
Lou Holtz
#37. Don't be a spectator, don't let life pass you by.
Lou Holtz
#38. Nor was Mr. Bumble's gloom the only thing calculated to awaken a pleasing melancholy in the bosom of a spectator. There
Charles Dickens
#39. I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
#40. The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
John Berger
#41. Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer.
Arnold Aronson
#42. Emily Zanotti is a Republican political strategist and author. She is a regular contributor to The American Spectator and a featured opinion columnist with The Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared across the political spectrum, in National Review, The Daily Caller, Slate, and elsewhere.
Joanne Bamberger
#43. While the goal of all movies is to entertain, the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimulates thought and sets the mental juices flowing.
Sidney Lumet
#44. An image means nothing. It is just a door, leading to the next door. It will never happen that we will find the truth we are looking for just in an image; it will happen behind the last door that the spectator discovers the truth, because of his own efforts.
Antoni Tapies
#45. Surviving one's own life, living on the other side of it like a spectator, is quite comfortable after all. You no longer expect anything, no longer fear anything, and every hour is like a memory.
Simone De Beauvoir
#46. Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.
Walter Benjamin
#47. Precisely because I'm a man who is attracted to women, there may be some things that I have to say as a spectator of feminine grace that women themselves may not be able to see.
William T. Vollmann
#48. Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#49. To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires ... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.
Michael Snow
#50. I'm a huge music fan. I usually say that if I had been born with a musical inclination, it would've been great. The Beatles changed everything for me, and I wanted to be a journalist for 'Rolling Stone.' I'm a big music fan in a Cameron Crowe way, kind of in a spectator way.
Emma Stone
#51. Art is a celebration of life, intended by the artist to put the spectator in touch with the divine.
Joseph Plaskett
#52. He'd somehow lived a detached life, more Like a spectator than a participant in his own existence.
Guillaume Musso
#53. Personally, I've never understood inactivity. Why a person would sit when he could soar, be a spectator when he could play, or atrophy when he could develop ... is beyond me!
Bill Hybels
#54. The only time you actually are a spectator of your own work is the day you read the script.
Antonio Banderas
#55. Editing is not merely a method of the junction of separate scenes or pieces, but is a method that controls the 'psychological guidance' of the spectator.
Vsevolod Pudovkin
#56. In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.
Bridget Riley
#57. The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.
Lawren Harris
#58. In one respect, it's easier to open a restaurant in New York because you get more media attention than anywhere else. Almost everyone will try a new place once, irrespective of the reviews, because it's a spectator sport.
Danny Meyer
#59. Both cinematic culture and the culture at large have changed profoundly. We're now in post-cinematic digital culture, and the internet has obviously usurped movies, which are no longer central to our lives, at least not as a collective spectator experience.
Masha Tupitsyn
#60. The sight of a being who is not graced by any touch of a pure and good will but who yet enjoys an uninterrupted prosperity can never delight a rational and impartial spectator. Thus a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of being even worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant
#61. In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
#62. A real tank now costs about a million dollars, while a hallucinated one amounts to less than one-hundredth of a cent per person, or centispecter per spectator. A destroyer costs a dime. Today you could fit the whole arsenal of the United States inside a single truck.
Stanislaw Lem
#63. I like the guy who reads. Being articulate is something that's very important to me. But you need to know how to chop wood and fix a car and do guy things. I didn't grow up with spectators. Nobody was a spectator.
Hilarie Burton
#64. The more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.
Bruno Dumont
#65. But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself.
Elaine Dundy
#66. The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas ... Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture.
Mark Rothko
#67. I love my homeland, but it's an absurd country. Politics in the Philippines is like spectator sports!
Miguel Syjuco
#69. Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.
Antonin Artaud
#70. Love, reverence, and adoration, are multifaceted emotions. Similar to a painting by an artist, how we respond to a beautiful woman, nature, and the world that we encounter reveals the spectator and not life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#71. War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.
Chris Hedges
#72. Rule One: Whenever a spectator seeks out a really good vantage point and settles down on shooting stick or canvas chair, the tallest and fattest golf watcher on the course will take up station directly in front.
Peter Dobereiner
#73. The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]
Elizabeth Bowen
#74. What really matters for me is ... the more active role of the observer in quantum physics ... According to quantum physics the observer has indeed a new relation to the physical events around him in comparison with the classical observer, who is merely a spectator.
Wolfgang Pauli
#75. Even as a spectator, beer tastings and festivals are just about the best way to learn about - and enjoy - beer. Many of the events in
Randy Mosher
#76. One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator's sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
Edgar Allan Poe
#78. Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.
Al Kooper
#79. [On being told by a horse show spectator that she looked like Princess Anne:] I think I'm a bit better-looking than she is.
Anne, Princess Royal
#80. Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.
Charles Simic
#81. A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.
Henri Matisse
#82. The Lord didn't make Lehi a mere spectator, watching and learning from afar. Instead, the Lord taught his prophet by taking him out of the bleachers and placing him right in the middle of the action.
John Bytheway
#83. You can get a certain amount of pleasure as a mathematical spectator, reading and watching some of the most beautiful arguments that have been created in the history of humanity. But that's too passive.
Steven Strogatz
#84. You are either a player or a spectator! Players influence the game while spectators watch them to do it. Such is life!
Israelmore Ayivor
#85. I enjoyed watching good-looking idiots looking at each other. A great spectator sport.
Jeff Lindsay
#86. I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I'm also a poet and have had work in the 'Spectator.'
Maurice Flanagan
#87. There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator.
Alain Resnais
#88. A man truly falls in love with a woman from a distance, as an observer, as a spectator taking in her true essence when she is unguarded, when she is wholly and honestly unaware of his attention. And she was.
Paul Cwalina
#89. The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
Bernard Berenson
#90. His body walks out onto the darkened stage , and a roar goes up from the crowd. He stands in front of the mic, and he can feel his face twist in a sneer-the Elvis sneer from his dreams-though he never told it to move. He is powerless now, a spectator at his own moment of glory.
Joseph Garraty
#91. I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.
Michael Haneke
#92. Curiosity, easily frightened, takes refuge in puzzles, murder mysteries, and spectator sports.
Mason Cooley
#93. Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.
Aime Cesaire
#94. I am lost! Someone has taken over my mind and is controlling it! Someone is in command of all my actions, movements, and thoughts. I am nothing inside, merely a spectator enslaved and terrified by everything I do.
Guy De Maupassant
#95. I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#96. Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men.
H.P. Lovecraft
#97. I'm a citizen in a democracy. To call me an activist would be redundant. It's not a spectator sport. If we all become non-participants, it no longer works.
Michael Moore
#98. I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that's never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#99. Don't be a spectator in the kingdom of God , find something that you can do , at-least even going to church is one of them
Alinani Joe
#100. One has been a poor spectator of life if one has not witnessed the hand - that kills from mercy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
