Irving Stone Quotes

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.

It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved. [Vincent Van Gogh]

How difficult it is to be simple.

It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?" "Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.

Normal people do not create art.

To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.

There's no love without pain.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

You cannot be the good all the time — sometimes it is necessary to get angry. [Vincent Van Gogh]

I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.

On croit que j'imagine — ce n'est pas vrai — je me souviens. [They say I imagine — it is not true — I remember.]

Loneliness is a kind of prison. [Vincent Van Gogh]

You cannot be firmly certain about anything. You can only have enough courage and strength to do what you consider to be right. Maybe it turns out that was wrong, but still you would have done his, and it is most important.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

He had always loved God. In his darkest hours he cried out, "God did not create us to abandon us.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

Life's not so bad after all. There are not only poison but also antidotes.

Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.

From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud's fiance after he teased her for being sweet, "Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.

Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]

The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.

Savoir souffrir sans se plaindre, ça c‘est la seule chose pratique, c‘est la grande science, la leçon à apprendre, la solution du problème de la vie. [Knowing how to suffer without complaining is the only practical thing, it's the great science, the lesson to learn, the solution to the problem of life.]

We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.

After all, the world is still great.

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.

A person may paint or talk about painting but he cannot do both at the same time.

Listen, my friend, all forms that exist in God's universe can be found in the human figure. A man's body and face can tell everything he represents. So how could I ever exhaust my interest in it?

What we know of others is our personal secret.

Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

Everyone has their own personality, its own character, and if he respects that, everything would finally fall over for good only.

Dr. Irving Stone of the Institute for Forensic Sciences in Dallas. He’s the guy who analyzed the clothing worn by President Kennedy and Governor Connally for the congressional committee that reexamined the Kennedy assassination.

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.

Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]

What meaning has a compliment if one hears it night and day.

No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him.

I will be an artist. I am sure I will. [Vincent Van Gogh]

Artists thrive on suffering.

The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.

When I compare myself to the other fellows there is something stiff and awkward about me; I look as if I had been in prison for ten years.

Who loves — lives, who lives - works, and who works has some bread.

There are neither good nor evil, only the existence and action.

First, we think all truth is beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain is good because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex is beautiful even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety without making moral judgments. We think the prostitute is as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature and are woven into the design of life!

Religion will never show the way.

A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings.

Vincent did not know how to express his feelings in words. He knew how to paint them. However, one cannot paint the farewell.

He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.

Pain did curious things to him. It made him sensitive to the pain of others.

Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.

Sometimes men are generous and forgiving, sometimes angry and blind.

Being mad is even pleasant. But only a madman understands that.

The sculptor is master of time; he can change his subjects forward or back.

The artist has to take risks.

How can a young person learn whether he chose the correct way? He thinks he has a special idea, and then he discovers that he is completely inappropriate for it.

Money makes the man a beast.

Our secret thoughts - do they ever show up? The small flame of our soul can be burning hot, but no one comes to its warmth. Passersby see only a small whiff going through the chimney. Don't we need to take care of that flame, cherish it and patiently wait until someone will come and sit at it, do we?

[...] And suddenly Vincent clearly realised what his subconsciousness had known for a long time. All the talks about God are just childish elusion, just a lie that calms a scared and lonely ordinary mortal in a dark and neverending night. There is no God. Sure as fate - there is no God. There is only chaos - dismal, painful, cruel, agonizing, blind, endless chaos.

...and rout the magical mystical moonlight with fierce proof of its own greater power to light, to heat, to make everything known.

An artist does not have to think about what he is doing.

No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.

One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.

We are all are cripples in some way. [Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec]

L'arte è fatta per coloro che si sente indegno senza di essa.

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.

Alla guerra di amor vince chi fugge.

Diligence does not work if there is a lack of innate talent.

Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only - he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.

It's not macho to read? Nonsense. Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-itness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home run, a slamdunk, or breaking the four-minute mile.

Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality.

Guilty, Your Honor, but only of minor transgressions. My motto is, 'Let no girl, no gun, no cards, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness keep you from your books.

Wiedział dawniej, że można złamać rękę lub nogę i wyzdrowieć; do tej pory nie wiedział jednak, że można wyzdrowieć po ataku szaleństwa.

An empty stomach is better than full and grief is better than happiness.

A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.

The simplest things that need self-restraint are the most difficult to replicate.

The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.

It was only a remote portion of his mind that heard and answered the girl. The rest of him was soaking up her beauty with the passionate thirst of a man who has drunk too long at a celibate well.

From this vantage point he came to a realization that everything that had happened to him before this had been a journey upward through time, everything that occurred after it a descent. If he could not control his fate, why be born?

There seemed to be that same fierce quest after truth, the same unafraid penetration, the same feeling that character is beauty, no matter how sordid it may appear.

As he reached the door of the chapel and turned back for a last look, he saw that the Virgin too was sad and lonely; the most alone human being God ever put on earth.

Sa svakim novim jezikom čovek dobija nov život; jer ako znamo jezik jedne strane zemlje, možemo da upoznamo njenu književnost, njeno ponašanje i običaje...

Never let it happen to you as it did to me. That you wake in the morning, stare at the ceiling, ask yourself, 'What have I got to get up for today?' and answer... 'Nothing.

We are giving the world back to man, and man back to himself. Man shall no longer be vile, but noble. We shall not destroy his mind in return for an immortal soul. Without a free, vigorous and creative mind, man is but an animal, and he will die like an animal, without any shred of a soul. We return to man his arts, his literature, his sciences, his independence to think and feel as an individual, not to be bound to dogma like a slave, to rot in his chains.

It's pleasant to get used to the expensive, the soft, the comfortable. Once you're addicted, it's so easy to become a sycophant, to trim the sails of your judgment in order to be kept on. The next step is to change your work to please those in power, and that is death to the sculptor.

They had painted in a grand rush to keep intact the purity of their first impression, the mood in which the motif had been conceived.

Even in your kindness there is a cruel revelation. Life is cruel, never love.

Many times in your life you may think you are failing, but ultimately you will express yourself and that expression will justify your life.

What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn't matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam. (Mendes Da Costa

That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture; in the center the weak, confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup a loft, behind him the idyllic child, clear-eyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy ; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr, eternally young and gay, symbol of man’s childhood and naughty innocence

He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante's Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man's unvarnished verdict of himself?

She must always remember that: love ebbed and flowed, now rich and shining, now shabby and disconsolate. One must survive the bad in order to realize the good. Therein lay the miracle of love, that it could eternally recreate itself. She must always be dedicated, no matter what the years held, what the hardships or disappointments, the sorrows or tragedies: she must come through them all, through the most violent and frightening storms; for at the other end, no matter how long it might take or how dark the passage, one could emerge into clear warm sunlight.

Weeks passed, Vincent did nothing - just ate, slept or sat staring at one point. [...] He wandered around the neighborhood in order to stretch his legs or just for pleasure. He walked because he was annoyed to lie, to sit or to stand. When he got tired of walking, he was sitting, lying or standing.

Dr. Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Dr. Larch whisper, ‘Good work, Homer.’ He felt a second, even lighter kiss. ‘Good work, my boy,’ the doctor said, and then left him. Homer Wells felt his tears come silently; there were more tears than he remembered crying the last time he had cried – when Fuzzy Stone had died and Homer had lied about Fuzzy to Snowy Meadows and the others. He cried and cried, but he never made a sound; he would have to change Dr. Larch’s pillowcase in the morning, he cried so much. He cried because he had received his first fatherly kisses.

The desire to succeed had left Vincent. He worked because he had to, because it kept him from suffering too much mentally, because it distracted his mind. He could do without a wife, a home, and children; he could do without love and friendship and health; he could do without security, comfort, and food; he could even do without God. But he could not do without something which was greater than himself, which was his life—the power and ability to create.

The fields that push up the corn, and the water that rushes down the ravine, the juice of the grape, and the life of a man as it flows past him, are all one and the same thing. The sole unity in life is the unity of rhythm. A rhythm to which we all dance; men, apples, ravines, ploughed fields, carts among the corn, houses, horses, and the sun. The stuff that is in you, Gauguin, will pound through a grape tomorrow, because you and the grape are one. When I paint a peasant labouring in the field, I want people to feel the peasant flowing down into the soil, just as the corn does, and the soil flowing up into the peasant. I want them to feel the sun pouring into the peasant, into the field, the corn, the plough, and the horses, just as they all pour back into the sun. When you begin to feel the universal rhythm in which everything on earth moves, you begin to understand life….

Do you know the anecdote about Rubens? He was serving Holland as Ambassador to Spain and used to spend the afternoon in the royal gardens before his easel. One day a jaunty member of the Spanish Court passed and remarked, ‘I see that the diplomat amuses himself sometimes with painting,’ to which Rubens replied, ‘No, the painter amuses himself sometimes with diplomacy!

Lorenzo il Magnifico, the Plato Four, the humanists had taught him that man was the center of the universe; and this was never more demonstrable that when he stood looking upward and found himself, a lone individual, serving as the central pole holding up the tarpaulin of sun and clouds, moon and stars, knowing that, lone or abandoned as he might feel, without his support the heavens would fall.

These workers," said Mendes with a gentle sweep of his arm, "have a hard life of it. When illness comes they have no money for a doctor. The food for tomorrow comes from today's labour, and hard labour it is, too. Their houses, as you see, are small and poor; they are never more than a stone's throw away from privation and want. They've made a bad bargain with life; they need the thought of God to comfort them.

When I was a kid, I just read and read. We were lucky enough to have gone to England and had a whole bunch of Penguin Puffins books, like The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley, which is hilarious. I would love to be able to write a book like that, but I don't know that I have a humorous bone in my body when it comes to writing. Once on a Time by A.A. Milne. I read a lot of old, old fantasy stuff. The Carbonelbooks by Barbara Sleigh. Then when I got a little older I loved Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I was a big fan of romance and when I got a little bit older I would read a Harlequin romance or a Georgette Heyer novel and then David Copperfield, and then another genre book and then Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy. I was that kind of reader. One book that I loved was I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. I loved voice and that book had it in spades. And then of course I grew into loving Jane Eyre.

It was like penetrating deep into white marble with the pounding live thrust of his chisel beating upward through the warm living marble with one ”Go!”, his whole body behind the heavy hammer, penetrating through ever deeper and deeper furrows of soft yielding living substance until he had reached the explosive climax, and all of his fluid strength, love, passion, desire had been poured into the nascent form, and the marble block, made to love the and of the true sculptor, and responded, giving of its inner heat and substance and fluid form, until at last the sculptor and the marble had totally coalesced, so deeply penetrating and infusing each other that they had become one, marble and man and organic unity, each fulfilling the other in the greatest act of art and love known to the human species.