"To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors."
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Quote collection
Irving Stone quotes (page 2 of 4)
78 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears--I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block."
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"The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day."
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"The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing."
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"Man's spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food."
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"No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him."
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"If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itelf with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries."
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"Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives."
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"God did not create us to abandon us."
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"...that horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time."
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"The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas."
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"Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing."
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"From out of pain, beauty."
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"An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours."
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"Every human life had its pattern that had to be worked out slowly to its ultimate conclusion."
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"Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones."
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"He who loves lives, he who lives works, and he who works has bread."
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"There's no love without pain."
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"I cannot draw a human figure if I don't know the order of his bones, muscles or tendons. Same is that I cannot draw a human face if I don't know what's going on his mind and heart. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist."
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"After all, the world is still great."
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