Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of
heaven we have below.
-- Joseph Addison
"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you
that you have one."
-- Stella Adler
"In the books I read the sinners are always more interesting
than the saints, and in real life good people are dismally dull. I've no
desire to be wicked, but I do want to be happy. A short life and a gay
one for me and I'm willing to pay for my pleasure if it is necessary."
-- Louisa May Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase
"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not
love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer;
not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love.
To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore,
to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."
-- Woody Allen
Has anyone ever told you you've got the most beautiful eyes?
I really do mean it. Do you like fast cars?
-- Adam Ant, "Playboy"
"There was never a genius without a tincture of madness."
-- Aristotle
"Wit is educated insolence."
-- Aristotle
"Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall
bring it into my own life."
-- Antonin Artaud
"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors,
and laugh at them in our turn?"
-- Jane Austen
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do
is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
-- Johann Sebastian Bach
"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say
you cannot do."
-- Walter Bagehot
"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and
this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for
real work, and that writing didn't require any."
-- Russell Baker
"It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never
have the time."
-- Tallulah Bankhead
The good die young -- because they it's no use in living
if you've got to be good."
-- John Barrymore
From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren,
What matter, if you make -- fairy with velvet eyes,
Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen --
The universe less hideous, each moment less strained?
-- Charles Baudelaire, "Hymn to Beauty"
"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his
own nature into his pictures."
-- Henry Ward Beecher
"Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning
this great goddess?"
-- Ludwig Van Beethoven
"True art is selfish and perverse -- it will not submit
to the mold of flattery."
-- Ludwig Van Beethoven
"A kiss is a rosy dot over the 'i' of loving."
-- Cyrano de Bergerac
"This wisdom descendeth not from above, it is earthly,
sensual, devilish."
-- The Bible, James 3:15
Egotist: A person more interested in himself than in me.
-- Ambrose Bierce
"Exuberance is Beauty."
-- William Blake
"If a thing loves, it is infinite."
-- William Blake
"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak
enough to be restrained."
-- William Blake
"The lust of the goat is the bounty of God."
-- William Blake
They don't walk, they just glide in and out of life
They never die, they just go to sleep one day
-- David Bowie, "Sons of the Silent Age"
"I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent."
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
"Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the
savoring of loneliness."
-- Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls
"The devil's most devilish when respectable."
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Misled by fancy's meteor ray,
By passion driven;
But yet the light that led astray,
Was light from heaven.
-- Robert Burns, "The Vision"
"A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a
sword."
-- Robert Burton
"Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure."
-- Lord Byron
"The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating
others, but he who can be imitated by none."
-- Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand
"The only difference between reality and fiction is fiction
has to make sense."
-- Tom Clancy
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan,
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan"
"Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity."
-- Charles G. Dawes
"Only the passions, only great passions, can elevate
the mind to great things."
-- Denis Didrot
"In science, one tries to tell people, in such a way as
to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But
in poetry, it's the exact opposite."
-- Paul Dirac
She has robes and she has monkeys
Lazy diamond studded flunkies
She has wisdom and knows what to do
She has me and she has you
-- The Doors, "Love Street"
"To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die with thee again
in sweetest sympathy..."
-- John Dowland
"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent
instantly recognizes genius."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle
"When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind."
-- John Dryden
When I close my eyes, I see the flames of truth,
dancing to the malevolent rhythms of the night.
Dancing,m Dancing in the windows of my mind.
-- Ebony
"The music is a living thing. You have to listen to it and
let it breath."
-- from the movie Eddie and the Cruisers
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
-- Albert Einstein
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is
a stranger, who no longer pauses to wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as
good as dead."
-- Albert Einstein
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from
mediocrities."
-- Albert Einstein
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
-- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present,
must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive,
more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into its meaning."
-- T. S. Eliot
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
-- T. S. Eliot
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape
from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions
know what it means to want to escape from these things."
-- T. S. Eliot
"No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent
value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up
his life for nothing."
-- T. S. Eliot
"Art is a jealous mistress."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to
do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
-- Susan Ertz
"I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be
art."
-- Carrie Fisher
"Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don't
let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity."
-- R. I. Fitzhenry
"One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just
as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a solider."
-- Gustave Flaubert
"Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed
to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least,
not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French
for 'life jacket'."
-- Julian Barnes, from Gustave Flaubert's Parrot
"Love's tongue is in the eyes."
-- Phineas Fletcher
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only
connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human
love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."
-- E. M. Forster, Howard's End
"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in
the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though
I don't believe that only art matters, I do belive in Art for Art's sake."
-- E. M. Forster
"To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything."
-- Anatole France
"The good critic is one who tells of is mind's adventures
among masterpieces."
-- Anatole France
"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in
the innermost core of his personality."
-- Victor Frankel
"I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
-- Robert Frost
"Love is an irresistable desire to be irresistably desired."
-- Robert Frost
"Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
-- Robert Frost
"We've got not time for art. Fuck art, let's rock. I want
to be Keith Richards, I wanna play rock 'n' roll."
-- Noel Gallagher of Oasis
"To love one who also loves you, to admire one who admires
you, in a word, to be the idol of one's idol is exceeding the limit of
human joy, it is stealing fire from heaven."
-- Madame de Gerardio
Faint heart never won fair lady!
Nothing venture, nothing win
Blood is thick, but water's thin
In for a penny, in for a pound
It's Love that makes the world go 'round!
-- Sir William Schwenk Gilbert, "Iolanthe"
"Create, artist! Do not talk!"
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"I call architecture frozen music."
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"We all enter this world in the same way: naked, screaming,
and soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing
doesn't have to stop there."
-- Dana Gould
"Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the
reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away
and there is no longer art."
-- Remy de Gourmont
"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."
-- Paul Guaguin
"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be
witty."
-- Sacha Guitry
"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk
about other people."
-- Lucille S. Harper
forsaken heaven
cursed god above
laid with the devil
bring you my love
-- P. J. Harvey, "To Bring You My Love"
"Love is a hole in the heart."
-- Ben Hecht
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist:
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much of Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
And something of the Shorter-Catechist.
-- William Ernest Henley, "Apparition"
"You're an actor, are you? Well, all that means is: you
are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and incapable of handling an adult
emotion or a universal concept without first reducing it to something personal,
material, sensational -- and probably sexual!"
-- George Herman, A Company of Wayward Saints
"No arts, no letters -- no society."
-- Thomas Hobbes
"Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important."
-- Lisa Hoffman
"Hypocrisy is the lubricant of society."
-- David Hull
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
-- Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
"A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain."
-- Leigh Hunt
"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes
importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."
-- Henry James
If we could not laugh, we could not bear to cry.
If we could not cry, we could not bear to live.
-- Japenese proverb
And we tried so hard
And we looked so good
And we lived our lives in black
-- Jesus and Mary Chain, "Happy When It Rains"
"You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever
the sweetest."
-- John Keats
Darkling I listen, and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme
-- John Keats
I'd better be a poet
Or lay down dead.
-- Jack Kerouac, "42nd Chorus"
"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively
maladjusted."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
-- Stephen King
When it is for lust we are blamed, it is love we are denied.
-- Brian Kinsman
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by
mankind."
-- Rudyard Kipling
The Devil whispered behind the leaves, "it's pretty, but
is it Art?"
-- Rudyard Kipling
"It's not peace I want, not mere contentment. It's boundless
joy and ecstasy for me."
-- Kugell
"Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten
years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic."
-- James Laver
"Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness.
And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of
sex and beauty, is intuition."
-- D. H. Lawrence
And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunken delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
-- D. H. Lawrence
"Be it ever so decadent, there's no place like home."
-- Tom Lehrer
"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting."
-- Gloria Leonard
"I can write better than anybody who can write faster,
and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."
-- A. J. Liebling
I wanna kiss you in Paris
I wanna hold your hand in Rome
I wanna run naked in a rainstorm
Make love in train cross-country
-- Madonna, "Justify My Love"
"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"
-- Christopher Marlowe
"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation
from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."
-- W. Somerset Maugham
"Any clod can have the facts; having opinions is an art."
-- Charles McCabe
"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the
American public."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish."
-- Michelangelo
In search of love and music
My whole life has been
Illumination
Corruption
And diving, diving, diving, diving,
Diving down to pick up every shiny thing
-- Joni Mitchell
"Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly."
-- Moliere
You have a lovely singing voice,
a lovely singing voice
and all those who sing on key,
they stole the notion from you and me
-- Morrisey, "Sing Your Life"
"Perhaps I'm unique because people are so dull. I'm not
very good at being dull."
-- Morrisey
The Night is young, and full of rest
I can't describe the, way she's dressed
She'll pander to some, strange requests
Anything that you suggest Anything to please her guest
-- Jim Morrison
"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime,
cruelty, soft music."
-- Vladimir Nabokov
"The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds."
-- Jawaharial Nehru
"Without music, life would be a mistake."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness
and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!"
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush
against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome
men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want
to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive
faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it."
-- Anaïs Nin, Henry and June
"It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes
the romantic character in art."
-- Walter Pater
"Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience,
and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right."
-- Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns
"Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth
can be acheinved only through persistent exercise of real love."
-- M. Scott Peck, M.D.
"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear
but forgetting where you heard it."
-- Laurence J. Peter
"Give me a museum and I'll fill it."
-- Pablo Picasso
"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally
well."
-- Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"
"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which
escape those who dream only by night."
-- Edgar Allen Poe, "Eleonora"
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
-- Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore
(translates to)
"I lived for art, I lived for love"
-- Giacomo Puccini, Tosca
"Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express
emotion."
-- Kate Reid
But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end
as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking,
you overpowered their noise with harmony, and
from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Sonnets to Orpheus"
"I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal."
-- Arthur Rimbaud, "Ma Boheme, Fantaisie"
"I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.
The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement
of all the senses."
-- Arthur Rimbaud
"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't
need."
-- Rodin
"I'm a simple man. All I want is enough sleep for two
normal men, enough whiskey for three, and enough women for four."
-- Joel Rosenberg, The Warrior Lives
"Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise."
-- Duc de La Rouchefoucauld
"He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum
of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas."
-- John Ruskin, Modern Painters
"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world
are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example."
-- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Our hearts are drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.
-- George W. Russell
"A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want
to take it off you."
-- Francoise Sagan
"We kiss. And it feels like we have shrugged off the world."
-- Jim Shahin
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
-- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.
-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
"I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed
it, and I don't know why I'll do it again."
-- Bart Simpson
I would go out tonight
But I haven't got a stitch to wear
this man said, "it's gruesome
that someone so handsome should care."
-- the Smiths,"This Charming Man"
"Because the alternative is unthinkable"
--Methos, "Highlander The Series"
"Love, you mock us for your sport."
-- Sophocles, Antiogne
"Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry,
may truly be called the efflorescence of civilized life."
-- Herbert Spencer
"Irresponsibility isn't a sickness -- it's an art."
-- Remington Steele
I've been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I've done all the old ones 'til they've all been done in
Now I'm just looking, then I'm gone with the wind
Endlessly searching for an original sin.
-- Jim Steinman, "Original Sin" (sung by Meatloaf)
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
My hunger for her explains everything I've done
-- Sting, "Sister Moon"
What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine
hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky
bastard who's the artist.
-- Tom Stoppard
I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and
I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love and I can do you all three
concurrent or consecutive but I can't do you love and rhetoric without
blood. Blood is compulsory -- they're all blood you see.
-- Tom Stoppard
"Ink drips from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness
like mine. I have been eating poetry."
-- Mark Strand
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain,
We'd hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find is mouth a rein.
-- Algernon Charles Swinburne, "A Match"
"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally
you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."
-- Elizabeth Taylor
"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone,
but they've always worked for me."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
"Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission
to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen."
-- Leo Tolstoy
In the garden I was playing the tart
I kissed your lips and broke your heart
-- U2, "Until the End of the World"
"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
-- Paul Valery
The long sobs
Of the violins
Of autumn
Pierce my heart
With monotonous languor.
-- Paul Verlaine, "Chanson d'Automne"
"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have
imagined that virginity could be a virtue."
-- Voltaire
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters
of our real life."
-- Simone Weil
"An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist
but critic."
-- H. G. Wells
"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
-- H. G. Wells
"Love isn't an emotion or an instinct -- it's an art."
-- Mae West
"Too much of a good thing is wonderful."
-- Mae West
"An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises."
-- Mae West
"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common
symptom of immaturity -- the dread of doing what has been done before."
-- Edith Wharton
animal whisperings intoxicate the night
hypnotize the desperate, slow motion light
wash away into the rain, blood, milk and sky
hollow moons illuminate, and beauty never dies
-- White Zombie, "Blood Milk and Sky"
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.
-- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the
world has known."
-- Oscar Wilde
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
-- Oscar Wilde
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to
it."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Art should never try to be popular. The public should
try to make itself artistic."
-- Oscar Wilde
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People
are either charming or tedious."
-- Oscar Wilde
"There is one thing in the world worse than being talked
about, and that is not being talked about."
-- Oscar Wilde
"A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.
The public to him are non-existent."
-- Oscar Wilde
"America is the only country that went from barbarism
to decadence without civilization in between."
-- Oscar Wilde
"I like the word 'indolence.' It makes my laziness seem
classy."
-- Bern Williams
"Filmmaking, like sex, isn't a polite enterprise. It involves
a lot of mess and the bottom line is, if somebody ain't screaming, you're
not doing your job."
-- James Woods
"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
-- Virginia Woolf
"The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the
vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and
over all time."
-- William Wordsworth
"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity."
-- William Wordsworth
Sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood,
and felt along the heart.
-- William Wordsworth
"Costumes are so much better than clothes. They're like
drugs, they change your personality."
-- Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in
the Warhol Factory
"That's the thing I loved about drag queens, life was
a constant movie; no matter how ridiculously things didn't match they would
sacrifice everything for the pose, and I was definitely into the pose."
-- Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in
the Warhol Factory
"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture
of our own we have no soul of our own civilization."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
"Every great architect is -- necessarily -- a great poet.
He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
"True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals.
It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building,
or a park. At its best, it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in
graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do
without the necessities."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
"Architecture is not a goal. Architecture is for life
and pleasure and work and for people. The picture frame, not the picture."
-- William Wurster
In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight...
No people die but worlds die in them.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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