Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sum; but you have to make the romance, and it will come to the question how much fire you have in your belly.

Business | Character | Life | Life | Question | Romance | Will |

Samuel Butler

A man's work whether in music, painting or literature is always a portrait of himself.

Literature | Man | Music | Wisdom | Work |

Samuel Butler

Communication of all kinds is like painting - a compromise with impossibilities.

Wisdom |

Edgar Degas, born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Means | Wisdom |

Simonides, aka Simonedes of Ceos NULL

Painting is silent poetry, poetry painting that speaks.

Poetry | Wisdom |

Howard Sparks

The art of our era is not art, but technology. Today Rembrandt is painting automobiles; Shakespeare is writing research reports.

Art | Era | Research | Technology | Wisdom | Writing | Art |

Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne

Both music and painting add a spirit to devotion, and elevate the ardor.

Devotion | Music | Spirit | Wisdom |

Paul Gardner

A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places.

James M. Gillis

Art is revelation. If painting shows only what is there, it is not art. Art like fine music or high literature must carry the beholder beyond this world and all that appears in it, transport him to the shores of the eternal world and enable him to see and hear the things not given to the tongue of man to utter.

Art | Eternal | Literature | Man | Music | Revelation | World | Art |

Nick Catalina

Imagine your life is a painting in progress and you are the artist. Each new moment, a blank space on your canvas. The ones painted are your past. Each new moment, another brush stroke, created from your hand, moved by spirit, mind, heart and soul. Strive to make your painting a "masterpiece," and alas - when it is finished, Life will proclaim, "Ahh yes ... well done!"

Heart | Life | Life | Mind | Past | Progress | Soul | Space | Spirit | Will |

Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

Mathematics... possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

Art | Beauty | Mathematics | Music | Nature | Perfection | Truth | Art | Beauty |

Daniel Boorstin, fully Daniel Joseph Boorstin

What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art - especially of a painting - by how widely and how well it is reproduced?

Age | Art | Work | Art |

Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.

Effort | Industry | Invention | Joy | Writing | Happiness |

John Ruskin

Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.

Excellence | Life | Life | Quiet | Strength | Success | Will | Words |

Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

Poetry |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Business | Life | Life |

Federico Fellini

I`m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it`s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It`s not just an art form; it`s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It`s my way of telling a story.

Art | Life | Life | Music | Art |

Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.

Writing |

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

When ambition enters, creativity disappears -- because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future -- and a creative person is always in the present.

Ambition | Creativity | Future | Love | Man | Writing | Ambition |