If you were to hang a motto in your home, what would it say?
If you were given $100,000 to celebrate someone or something, who or what would you celebrate?
If you were to fast-forward your life five years, where would you be and what would you be doing? What changes would people see in you?
If you could take back something you said in 2009, what would it be?
If you were going to a costume party next week, what costume would you wear?
If you could grant any three wishes to one person, to whom would you grant them? Why?
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~ Scott Adams
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
~ Theodore Adorno
It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.
~ Samuel Butler
Nature is the Art of God.
~ Dante Alighieri in Monarchy
Art is a quest for the useless.
~ Gustave Flaubert
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
~ Rollo May
But then no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.
~ Irving Stone, in Lust for Life
Art is not pleasure, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art?
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If you were to get a tattoo, what would it be and where would you put it?
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The essence of lying is in deception, not in words; a lie may be told in silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar significance to a sentence; but all of these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded.
~ John Ruskin, in Modern Painters
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
~ in Sesame and Lilies
In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong, honor that; try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes.
Pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
The Bible is the one book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable–nay, letter by letter… you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” uneducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy– you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
If you could be any age for the rest of your life, what age would you choose? Why?
