Top 100 Spectator Quotes
#1. I don't like too much by-standing, on-looking, and spectator-behavior in people's lives.
Ralph Nader
#2. I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
Alan Furst
#3. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.
Rene Descartes
#4. There are two aspects," Alexey Alexandrovitch resumed: "those who take part and those who look on; and love for such spectacles is an unmistakable proof of a low degree of development in the spectator, I admit, but ...
Leo Tolstoy
#5. Politics, life, and business are not spectator sports. You have to get involved to get ahead. Most importantly, when you reach that level of success, keep the door open and the ladder down for others to follow.
Ron Brown
#6. Mathematics, you see, is not a spectator sport. To understand mathematics means to be able to do mathematics. And what does it mean [to be] doing mathematics? In the first place, it means to be able to solve mathematical problems.
George Polya
#7. Never keep staring at the dreams you have on the paper ... Don't just live like a spectator. You have the power, you have the mine, you have the skills, you can dribble your obstacles to get your goals moving to the other
Israelmore Ayivor
#8. In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
Jean Cocteau
#9. Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
#10. A true artist should have no secrets. On the stage, you must be able to transmit every emotion to the spectator.
Anna Pavlova
#11. The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.
Max Ernst
#12. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.
Bruno Dumont
#13. The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune.
Bert Williams
#14. Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?
Joshua Oppenheimer
#15. In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.
Andy Goldsworthy
#16. Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.
Paul Rand
#17. The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder. By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.
Alfred Sisley
#18. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
Oscar Wilde
#19. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#20. I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.
Marcel Duchamp
#21. We are making politics a spectator sport in which our only duty is to vote somebody into office and then retire to the grandstands.
David Gergen
#22. In conclusion, the idea of direction on the part of the photographer has its greatest value when its processes are least discernible to the spectator.
Arthur Rothstein
#23. Environmentali sm isn't a spectator sport. You actually have to stand up and demand that we be vigilant in protecting our air and water.
Lisa P. Jackson
#24. The true work of art continues to unfold and create within the personality of the spectator. It is a continuous coming into being.
Mervyn Levy
#25. God created everyone uniquely and for a purpose, and not to be on this earth as a passive spectator
Sunday Adelaja
#26. The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp
#28. I do feel for me that cinema has somehow ceased to be a spectator sport. I get tremendous excitement out of making it rather than watching it.
Peter Greenaway
#29. David Blaine, I think, was the first TV magician to really turn the camera around and make it about the spectator's experience. That's really what magic is all about.
Michael Carbonaro
#30. To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. I
Oscar Wilde
#32. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.
Charles Baudelaire
#33. Unlike my esteemed colleague Garry Kasparov, I don't restrict the strength of opposition to Elo <2000, as fly-swatting makes poor spectator sport. (on simultaneous exhibitions)
Nigel Short
#34. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, full-contact, participatory endeavor.
Cory Booker
#35. The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!
Augusto Boal
#36. No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
Kenneth Clark
#37. A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
Eugene Delacroix
#39. To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.
Thomas Hardy
#40. In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
#41. Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.
Ansel Adams
#42. Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.
Clement Greenberg
#43. How could I remain a spectator while Singapore faces such complex challenges? How could I not step forward when I know I have more to contribute to the country we all worked to build?
Tony Tan
#44. Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.
Francis Bacon
#45. What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.
Marc Chagall
#46. A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
Alain De Botton
#47. If any of you happens to see an injustice, you are no longer a spectator, you are a participant, and you have an obligation to do something.
June Callwood
#48. I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.
Galen Rowell
#49. Your mind is like a parachute : it's no use unless it's open. -the Spectator, 1883
Samantha Cote
#50. Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game
Edward Abbey
#51. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.
Christopher Hitchens
#52. It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures his existence.
Jim Morrison
#53. At such times I felt instinctively that a life and death struggle was going on inside me in which I, the owner of the body, was entirely powerless to take part, forced to lie quietly and watch as a spectator the weird drama unfolded in my own flesh.
Gopi Krishna
#54. Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.
Bruno Dumont
#55. The eyes sparked a lot of things for me, it could be somebody remembering something they had witnessed or heard about, or it could be the person in the photograph that was experiencing a tragedy or it could also be the spectator looking on from a safe distance.
Alex Prager
#56. Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.
Diane Ravitch
#57. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.
Oscar Wilde
#58. Nearly always, so as to live at peace with ourselves, we disguise our own impotence and weakness as calculation and policy; it is our way of placating that half of our being which is in a sense a spectator of the other.
Benjamin Constant
#59. Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.
Louis Menand
#60. Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution.
Kathryn Harrison
#61. A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#62. I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.
Ann Coulter
#63. The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator's mind.
Okakura Kakuzo
#64. I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me
and this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#65. So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#66. Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.
Confucius
#67. There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition - which means seeing things you're familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there's also hysterical laughter - a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us.
Michael Haneke
#68. It's a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing.
Pedro Almodovar
#69. I was really looking forward to doing the thing that I do - I basically appear just at the beginning and at the end of the play - but when I got to opening night, I started to get really sad that that was the last time I was going to see the play as a spectator without actually being in it.
Will Oldham
#70. My films require that the spectator ask the big existential questions. If you're not interested of turning inwards for answers, my films won't fulfill their whole purpose.
Lisa Langseth
#71. I think in space or music or art or literature of any kind there has to be some kind of void where the viewer or the spectator or the listener or the reader can insert themselves into it, and there is a certain kind of architectural space which is totalitarian, which does not allow you to do that.
Jonathan Meades
#72. I like watching films that are 94 minutes as a spectator. I think it's rare that you don't come out, even from a good film, thinking I wish it could have been a little bit shorter.
Guy Jenkin
#73. Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory.
Sigfried Giedion
#74. Today, I am an inquisitor. I shall not sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
Barbara Jordan
#75. If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.
Manuel Puig
#76. You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history rather than a spectator Father Fernando Cardenal
Barbara Kingsolver
#77. The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
John Berger
#79. As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
#80. A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud
#81. I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life.
Elaine Dundy
#82. What some highbrows call rapport is nothing more than a mild flirtation between photographer and the girl on the other side of the camera. Some models get so professional they can send hours flirting with the camera itself while the poor photographer is reduced to the role of spectator.
Sam Haskins
#83. Everyone is equal and everyone is forced to participate; you can't just be a spectator.
Chuck Palahniuk
#84. To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
Oscar Wilde
#85. Pornography and cooking shows have created two new spectator sports.
Mason Cooley
#86. Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
John Berger
#87. Life is too precious to be a spectator sport. We are no longer merely fans, rooting for the winning team. We are the team. We are the grown-ups. Whatever you believe is true, now is the time to give your respectful, inquisitive, and compassionate self to it.
Vicki Robin
#88. Will you be a spectator or a citizen? To make a difference in this world, you must be involved.
George W. Bush
#89. I began my comedy as its only actor and I come to the end as its only spectator.
Antonio Porchia
#90. There is only one emotion that I know of which has absolutely no place in spectator sport and death to it - laughter.
Rene Maheu
#91. I can't remember anything without a sadness so deep that it hardly becomes known to me, so deep that its tears leave me a spectator of my own stupidity.
John Lennon
#92. I don't regard nature as a spectator sport.
Ed Zern
#93. I have always been a spectator of life, you know, never a participant. Never. But now I am. Today I am, and I an awed and deliriously happy. This is the adventure I asked for, the adventure I am having I will be forever grateful to you.
Mary Balogh
#94. It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's
Samuel R. Delany
#95. The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
Aldous Huxley
#96. As a spectator, you get to watch everything, but I'd much rather be playing than watching. I'll have time to watch later in my career.
Landon Donovan
#97. You're here every night, you join in, but you always seem to be - I don't know - more of a spectator than a participant, as if you are studying us, possibly for some sort of anthropological purpose. Do you even like us?
Lisa Jewell
#98. The world is no longer man's theatre. Man has been made into a helpless spectator. The two evil forces he has created- science and the state- have combined into one monstrous body. We're at the mercy of our monster...
Eugene Burdick
#99. I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography - therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it.
Ansel Adams
#100. For me the whole world is like a gigantic theater in which I am the only spectator without opera glasses. The orchestra plays the prelude to the third act, the stage is far away as in a dream, my heart swells with delight - and you want to blind me with a pair of half-ruble spectacles?
Isaac Babel
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