Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
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Quotes
Seek not water, only show you are thirsty, / That water may spring up all around you.
—Rumi, c. 1260Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Labor is no disgrace.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCThe history of the land has been written very largely in water.
—John Hodgdon Bradley Jr., 1935The law is not the same at morning and at night.
—George Herbert, c. 1633People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
—Edmund Burke, 1790Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.
—Juvenal, c. 121We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction.
—Aesop, c. 600 BCNow there is fame! Of all—hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad. It is true.
—Pablo Picasso, c. 1961Insurgents are like conquerors: they must go forward; the moment they are stopped, they are lost.
—Duke of Wellington, c. 1819Machines seem to sense that I am afraid of them. It makes them hostile.
—Sharyn McCrumb, 1990