Mona Lisa Quotes

Anna, Anna," Josh interrupts. "If I had a euro for every stupid thing I've done, I could buy the Mona Lisa. You'll be fine.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles.

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

One moment, she was wearing clothing, and the next moment, she was wearing a bikini. Fifty percent of the world was brown skin and fifty percent was orange nylon. From the Mona Lisa smile on Orla's lips, it was clear she was pleased to finally be allowed to demonstrate her true talents. A tiny part of Gansey's brain said: You have been staring for too long. The larger part of his brain said: ORANGE.

People who lined up to see the Mona Lisa typically couldn’t name the paintings hanging nearby, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Da Vinci painted one Mona Lisa. Beethoven composed one Fifth Symphony. And God made one version of you.

I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.

Burn the Louvre, and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.

For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face.

If I had a euro for every stupid thing I've done, I could buy the Mona Lisa.

Well, now I felt horrible. I'd marred perfectly good ass cheeks for no reason. It was as if I'd sneezed on the Mona Lisa.

This is the Mona Lisa of bad diners.

She'd said that revenge was not sweet, that it was bloody. She was wrong. It *was* sweet. For one fleeting, glorious moment you felt incredible satisfaction. Then it was gone, empty, and you had to go on living. The power high that filled me with her light had faded, and all I tasted now were bitter ashes.

Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

His face cracks into the best smile I've ever seen and will ever see, because his face is... fuck The Mona Lisa, screw The Last Supper, never think of Michelangelo's David again—they all pale compared to him in front of me.

Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species and every whale and dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground. I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledge-hammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.

Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.

Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amelie and Moulin Rouge. The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, although I have no idea what the function of either actually is. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, and a lot of kings named Louis. I'm not sure what they did either, but I think it has something to do with the French Revolution, which has something to do with Bastille Day. The art museum is called the Louvre and it's shaped like a pyramid and the Mona Lisa lives there along with that statue of the women missing her arms. And there are cafes and bistros or whatever they call them on every street corner. And mimes. The food is supposed to be good, and the people drink a lot of wine and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I've heard they don't like Americans, and they don't like white sneakers.

A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what’s the use of debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football game — or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I’ll leave that to the philosophers.

She is a living, breathing work of art. As audacious as Dali's mustache, mysterious like a Mona Lisa smile. As sensual as O'Keeffe's painted petals, glorious, like a Van Gogh starry night.

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention. Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing? Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved. 'Burn the Louvre,' the mechanic says, 'and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.

I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all. When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem. "Which problem?" "The problem of how relatively insignificant we are." He said, "Well, what would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?" I said, "I'd probably die of dehydration." He said, "I just mean right then, when you moved that single grain of sand. What would that mean?" I said, "I dunno, what?" He said, "Think about it." I thought about it. "I guess I would have moved one grain of sand." "Which would mean?" "Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?" "Which would mean you changed the Sahara." "So?" "So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And it has existed for millions of years. And you changed it!" "That's true!" I said, sitting up. "I changed the Sahara!" "Which means?" he said. "What? Tell me." "Well I'm not talking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I'm just talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter." "Yeah? If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "Uh-huh?" "But you did do it, so...?" I stood on the bed, pointing one of my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!" "That's right." "I changed the universe!" "You did." "I'm God!" "You're an atheist." "I don't exist!" I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.

Yes, monsters all of us, I thought. And so horribly fragile.

You see?" Damien leaned over his desk and spread out half a dozen charcoal sketches. "These are only quick studies of course. But my agent in Florence tells me this artist, Leonardo, is a master and also quite an inventor of mechanical devices--which, as you know, are my passion. Leonardo just completed a portrait of Lisa de Giocondo. He calls it the Mona Lisa. I thought I might commission him to do a portrait of me, and while he's here, I can pick his mind for mechanical secrets. How does that sound?" "Expensive," Gideon murmured.

Under the disguise amulet, Jenks looked very different with black hair and a darker complexion. He had his new aviator jacket on over the T-shirt he had bought in the previous store, making him a sexy, leggy, hunk o’ pixy ass in jeans. No wonder he had fifty-four kids and Matalina smiled like Mona Lisa.

In time, all great masterpieces turn into shameless creatures who laugh at their creators.

Propose a theory to explain one of there eternal mysteries: Mona Lisa's smile, crop circles, or Velveeta. Here is a theory of love: you find a sister, you gain a brother; you lose a sister, you lose a brother; you lose a cat, you find a girl, you kiss a girl, you find the cat, you hope that there is nothing left to lose, and all there is, is there to find.

Why didn't you say something sooner! I said He wasn't the only one disgusted. This is my first time on a horse. Really? Blaec said dryly, I couldn't tell. Oh just pretend its my son you're riding.

Instead, she sat there, smiling that small, small inscrutable smile, like Mona Lisa herself, although I must say that until that moment, I'd never found Mona Lisa's smile particularly interesting or even particularly a smile. Looking at Lake, I understood what probably everyone else already knows about the woman in that painting: we are drawn to her not because of what the smile gives us but because it gives us nothing. We are waiting to get past the smile. We are waiting--we've spent centuries waiting--for the woman to speak.

Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.

Plagiarism, is like a fatal plague which has engulfed our generation and culminated impersonate clones. sad but true.. a caricature has replaced Mona Lisa.

Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the river that Leonardo described, each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo’s art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, each moment is not distinct but instead contains connections to a narrative.

There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.

The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and for good fruitarian measure.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who's fairest of them all? I'm Mona Lisa and She is plain, But the truth is - we all are Vain.

If someone told me I could hang out in da Vinci's studio while he painted the Mona Lisa or go up on Brian's roof with him at night - I'm on the roof

Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.

(The Mona Lisa), that really is the ugliest portrait I’ve seen, the only thing that supposedly makes it famous is the mystery behind it,” Katherine admitted as she remembered her trips to the Louvre and how she shook her head at the poor tourists crowding around to see a jaundiced, eyebrow-less lady that reminded her of tight-lipped Washington on the dollar bill. Surely, they could have chosen a better portrait of the First President for their currency?

Everyone collects souvenirs, whether they call them that or not. They're evidence that we’ve taken part in the great dance of life – been places, seen things. They’re connections between us and something grander and more eternal than we are. And they belong to us. Tourists shooting blurry mobile-phone-camera snapshots of the ‘Mona Lisa’ or Niagara Falls want to prove they were there, not to have art to hang on their walls.

But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?

I loved flawed art. Michelangelo’s statue of Lorenzo with its warped base that rose to accommodate his foot, the Mona Lisa’s missing eyebrows. Flaws were seriously underrated. They were beautiful if you looked at them just so.

We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it.

During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was fubar, an acronym for 'fucked up beyond all recognition.' Well - the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles, but, back in the early 1960s, I was one of the first persons to be totally wrecked by one - an acrylic wall-paint whose colors, according to advertisements of the day, would '... outlive the smile on the "Mona Lisa".' The name of the paint was Sateen Dura-Luxe. Mona Lisa is still smiling.

Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

We seem to live in a world where you have to walk around grinning like a loon. I can’t understand all the fuss about Mona Lisa painting, everyone wondering why she’s not smiling, if she’s depressed or heartbroken. No, she was just normal! Emotions are always extreme these days: you either have to be crying with laughter or crying in pain. No wonder water levels are rising. It’s not global warming, it’s all the tears from crying.

People going to see the Mona Lisa, not to look at it, but because it's the Mona Lisa

Like the famous lady in the frame (Mona Lisa), to many we remain a mystery

Despite for a monumental reputation, the Mona Lisa was a mere thirty-one inches by twenty-one inches -- smaller even than the posters of her sold in the Louvre gift shop.

Great art must not be sullied by politics. One would never, after all, seek to embellish the Mona Lisa, not even with a swastika.

¿Qué es peor, el infierno o la nada? Quema los museos, límpiate el culo con la Mona Lisa, para que al menos Dios aprenda tu nombre.

Its true that we learn a lot from science about how we function but there’s a danger in thinking knowledge of how we function is the full account of what we are. If you’re a chemist who is really interested in the optical properties of certain pigments you could analyse the Mona Lisa and describe it completely but you would never have mentioned the face, which is the meaning of this thing. In that way a neuroscientist can put together an enormously impressively picture of the brain but he would not have described what goes on when we react to another person.

We were approaching the Louvre, but he paused to lean on the parapet, and we both stood there contemplating the passing boats, which dazzled us with their spotlights. ‘Look at them,’ I said, because I needed to talk about something, afraid that he might get bored and go home. ‘They only see what the spotlights show them. When they go home home, they’ll say they know Paris. Tomorrow they’ll go and see the Mona Lisa and claim they’ve visited the Louvre. But they don’t know Paris and have never really been to the Louvre. All they did was go on a boat and look at a painting, one painting, instead of looking at a whole city and trying to find out what’s happening in it, visiting the bars, going down the streets that don’t appear in any of the tourist guides, and getting lost in order to find themselves again. It’s the difference between watching a porn movie and making love.

Mr. Winston and I had already discussed: How what I'd done was vile and on par with kicking disabled kittens. That I was on the path to becoming a criminal and likely would spend the rest of my life in jail giving myself homemade tattoos with a needle and Bic pen. That the statue was a work of art, and would I dare to ear the arm off the Mona Lisa? He didn't think so. That I was a disappointment to him, my family, my boyfriend, my fellow students, and likely all of Western civilization.

How do we imagine a great love? Perhaps something along the lines of Gone with the Wind or Titanic is what comes to mind. But those aren’t really about love itself, but about a situation. Everything becomes more grand when it takes place in the context of a civil war, a shipwreck, or natural catastrophe. But that is like judging the painting by the frame. That the Mona Lisa should be judged a masterpiece largely because of the carvings that surround it. Love is love. In the dramatic stories, the people involved are physically willing to give up their lives for each other, but that is exactly what happens in the great but everyday love also. You give your lives to each other the whole way and every day, until death.

She asked another question: "What does it matter if the rhinos die out? Is it really important that they are saved?" This would normally have riled me... but I had come to think of her as Dr. Spock from Star Trek - an emotionless, purely logical creature, at least with regards to her feelings for animals. Like Spock, though, I knew there were one or two things that stirred her, so I gave an honest reply. "... to be honest, it doesn't matter. No economy will suffer, nobody will go hungry, no diseases will be spawned. Yet there will never be a way to place a value on what we have lost. Future children will see rhinos only in books and wonder how we let them go so easily. It would be like lighting a fire in the Louvre and watching the Mona Lisa burn. Most people would think 'What a pity' and leave it at that while only a few wept

Then she smiled that subtle, mysterious Mona Lisa smile of hers that tilted the corners of her lush mouth and caused the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes to crease, where that bastard mortality had stroked her velvet skin with skeletal fingers and carved his mark on her before she had kicked him in the balls.

You still like me even after that?” His smile was gentle. “You could steal the Mona Lisa, and I know you’d do it for a good reason. I don’t think there’s anything you could do that I wouldn’t be all about, baby girl.

Art seems to be about coming up with your own story or take on each piece. This made me think about the mystery of the Mona Lisa. Everyone likes that painting cos they don’t know the story behind it. Who is she? Why the cheeky smile? If the Mona Lisa was done today, we’d know everything there was to know about her cos she’d have sold her story to Heat magazine and done some open-hearted interview with a tabloid before the paint was dry.

Every generation has the illusion that things were easier and better in a simpler past. Dead wrong. Things are better today than at any time in human history. Our primal ignorance is what keeps us whacking each other over the head with sticks, and not what allows us to paint a Mona Lisa or design a space shuttle. The 'primal ignorance that keeps us happy' gives rise to obesity and global warming, not antibiotics or the Magna Carta. If human kind flourishes rather than flounders over the next thousand years, it will be because we fully embraced learning and reason, and not because we surrendered to some fantasy about returning to a world that never really was.

Gentlemen, not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous, but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female. And that, my friends, is Da Vinci’s little secret, and the reason for Mona Lisa’s knowing smile.

The closest I’d ever got to seeing a naked woman before was black and white cleavage, and then Rosie tossed her clothes in a corner just like they were getting in the way and spun around in the dim light of Number 16, palms up, luminous, laughing, almost close enough to touch. The thought still knocks the wind out of me. I was too young even to know what I wanted to do about her, I just knew nothing in the World, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful.

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.

Oh yes, I want to play with 'Samson'. Come to Delilah.

We are not invisible because the world does not see us. We become invisible when we can no longer see ourselves.

It worked okay.

The quill has pricked my soul and each word bleeds onto the parchment of my life. My freedom is in my words, therefore, I write.

[Professor Kinnerton] Has the fact that we have about 97 percent of our DNA in common with chimpanzees escaped you? How can you still argue we are special and have a soul when we are so obviously animals? ... [Al Gleeson] With due respect sir, the 97 percent is precisely the problem. Are chimpanzees 97 percent of the way to splitting the atom? Are they 97 percent of the way to writing their first sonnet? Someone tittered at the back of the room. Are bonobos 97 percent of the way to putting the first bonobo on the moon? Is there an orangutan somewhere with a simian Mona Lisa 97 percent finished?

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative...we were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crispier, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

You girls," said Miss Brodie, "must learn to cultivate an expression of composure. It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair. Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder!

Beside him, very close beside him, was a gorgeous woman. She had masses of deep auburn hair and great violet eyes. She was not plump, yet she gave the impression of soft, rounded curves and comfortable hollows. She had an air of Mona Lisa, the Lady of Shalott. All her movements were slow with a lazy, languid indolence

A blush tinged her bronzed skin as she wrapped her arms around herself. Corrado grasped her wrists, pulling her hands away when she tried to shield herself. He stared at her, stunned to see the uncertainty in her eyes. "You're not nervous this time, are you?" he asked, half-teasingly, half honestly wanting to know. She'd been so confident, unwavering before. "It's the way you're looking at me." "How am I looking at you?" "Like you look at the Taj Mahal. Or the Sistine Chapel. You're staring at me like you stare at the Mona Lisa." "I've never seen those things." "It's like you've never seen something so beautiful before." "I haven’t.

I spent all day wandering up and down the hallways, staring at the Mona Lisa and Canova’s 'Psyche and Cupid' and the 'Venus de Milo' and Caravaggio’s 'The Death of the Virgin' and hundreds of other works in all shapes and sizes and colors. Just before I was about to leave, I was staring at Michelangelo’s 'The Dying Slave', and I suddenly realized that every single work I had seen expressed the same thing, the same intense longing for beauty and immortality and justice and compassion. It was as though all of these artists from throughout history were there in those long hallways crying out the same anguished plea in a thousand different languages.

Black Mona Lisa My umi's face is the most beautiful in the world Skin like sleeping in on snow days beneath thick blankets black Smile like an eighty-degree summer day in April bright Eyes like long subway rides looking out windows watching nothing and everything go by in the dark and letting my thoughts swim deep

Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore.

The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest. If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown ‘soulless’ black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark,’ replies Michelangelo.

A pity, ' he said, without a trace of mockery. 'It seems that those who possess the greatest beauty appreciate it the least.

No book is for everyone, but for everyone there is a book!

I believe in the future of humankind. As long as there are children, as long as there are people who look up at the night sky in sheer wonder, as long as there is music and poetry and the Mona Lisa -- and old monasteries and young artists and fledgling scientists and all the other expressions of human creativity -- I will remain optimistic." - Anton Zeilinger

I’m glad you still have your survival instinct.” “We’ve all got something.” I lift my fingertips to the exposed skin on my face. It’s colder than the night sea. Cupping my hands, I blow into them, let my breath warm my nose and cheeks. “I apparently still have a face, which is good.” Holden vaults up onto the wooden platform and I step up after him. “That is good,” he says, pulling me in close. He lifts his gloved hands to my cheeks. “After all, this is one of my favorite faces.” I scrunch my lips into a pretend pout. “One of?” He grins. “Well, you know. I’m a sucker for the classics. Helen of Troy, the Mona Lisa, that—” “Hey. The Mona Lisa isn’t even hot.” I give him a little shove away from me, toward the edge of the platform. “Disagree,” Holden says. “She’s beautiful in her own way. That mischievous smile, those dark, soulful eyes, the way she—” “Fine, whatever.” I cross my arms. “But I insist on being ranked above her.” “Okay, okay,” Holden says. “Yours can be my second-favorite face . . . right after that guy from The Scream.” He pulls me in close again. “You’re such an ass,” I say, as our lips touch. Holden laughs. “My girl Mona Lisa would never be so rude.

The very desire to preserve animals was a subjective sentiment of fail in the animal's intrinsic worth. It was a feeling possessed by most of the scientists there, who regarded the wildebeeste migration with the same awe that others feel for the Mona Lisa, but they would not admit this sentiment into their arguments because it could not be backed up by facts; the right and worng of aesthetics being imponderables not open to scientific analysis. At the end of the meeting there was a consensus of opinion on only one fact, that there was an urgent need for research before taking any hasty action.

. The tattooed goddess: her breasts have their own driver’s licenses, buttocks are cemented on a sidewalk in Hollywood, her legs shine for the glory of God, and her face is the canvas of Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in heaven. Had Sigmund Freud met her, his book, “The Interpretation of Dreams” would have been rewritten. Rapunzel to this day is jealous of her hair and Sandy Koufax is jealous of her curves, that beautiful, beautiful bitch.

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.

When we were lovers in high school,” he began and she knew who he meant by we, “it was my job to undress him many nights, but his clothes must be folded neatly, precisely, reverently, and then placed on a chair. No mess, no wrinkles. But he...he would strip me naked and drop all my clothes onto the floor. Then he’d walk on them. Not barefoot, either. With his shoes on most of the time. And you know what?” Kingsley asked as he stepped closer to her, close enough she could kiss him if she wanted to. “What?” “I worshipped him for it.” Kingsley smiled at her, a Mona Lisa smile that hinted of secrets but didn’t reveal them.

I got incerdibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I exsited at all... "Well I'm not talking about painting the Mona LIsa or curing limeter." "Yeah?" "If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "Uh-huh?" "But you did do it, so...?" I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!" "That's right." "I changed the universe!" "You did." "I'm God!" "You're an atheist." "I don't exist!" I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.

In Isaac Newton’s lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England’s most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea—based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. “This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now.” Exactly.

Who drew Mona Lisa?” asked one of the girls. “Leonardo da Vinci,” I said. No matter how dire everything else was, I could get immersed enough in their world that I was pleased with myself for knowing things like that. It wasn’t just famous people either. I’d provide the verb for what you did with a knife (“cut”) and I’d feel I’d been handed one of the good brains. This was why people became teachers, I thought. It wasn’t to help people. It was to be the cleverest person in the room, always, or at least to have people sufficiently confident you’d be that they’d call it your job and pay you for doing it. Really, it was more impressive that my eight-year-olds knew Mona Lisa existed than it was that I knew who’d created her.

Mida te nimetate õnneks? Kas kirge, mis paneb inimese sellisesse seisukorda nagu Jacques praegu? Näidake talle nüüd mõnda meistriteost, ja ta ei vaataks selle poolegi. Ja selleks et kas või kord veel näha oma kallimat, on ta valmis talluma Tiziani või Raffaeli maalil. Vaat minu kallim on surematu ega reeda mind iialgi. Ta elab Louvre'is ja tema nimi on Mona Lisa.

The good painter has to paint two principal things, man and the intention of his mind,” he wrote. “The first is easy and the second is difficult, because the latter has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs.”44 He expanded on this concept in a long passage in his notes for his planned treatise on painting: “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure. The motions and postures of figures should display the true mental state of the originator of these motions, in such a way they can mean nothing else. Movements should announce the motions of the mind.”45 Leonardo’s dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when dissecting the brain, to figure out the precise location where the connections were made between sensory perceptions, emotions, and motions. By the end of his career, his pursuit of how the brain and nerves turned emotions into motions became almost obsessive. It was enough to make the Mona Lisa smile.

For your sake poets sequester themselves, gather images to churn the mind, journey forth, ripening with metaphor, and all their lives they are so alone... And painters paint their pictures only that the world, so transient as you made it, can be given back to you, to last forever. All becomes eternal. See: In the Mona Lisa some woman has long since ripened like wine, and the enduring feminine is held there through all the ages. Those who create are like you. They long for the eternal. They say, Stone, be forever! And that means: be yours. And lovers also gather your inheritance. They are the poets of one brief hour. They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile as if creating it anew, more beautiful. Awakening desire, they make a place where pain can enter; that’s how growing happens. They bring suffering along with their laughter, and longings that had slept and now awaken to weep in a stranger’s arms.

St. Clair tucks the tips of his fingers into his pockets and kicks the cobblestones with the toe of his boots. "Well?" he finally asks. "Thank you." I'm stunned. "It was really sweet of you to bring me here." "Ah,well." He straightens up and shrugs-that full-bodied French shrug he does so well-and reassumes his usual, assured state of being. "Have to start somewhere. Now make a wish." "Huh?" I have such a way with words. I should write epic poetry or jingles for cat food commercials. He smiles. "Place your feet on the star, and make a wish." "Oh.Okay,sure." I slide my feet together so I'm standing in the center. "I wish-" "Don't say it aloud!" St. Clair rushes forward, as if to stop my words with his body,and my stomach flips violently. "Don't you know anything about making wishes? You only get a limited number in life. Falling stars, eyelashes,dandelions-" "Birthday candles." He ignores the dig. "Exactly. So you ought to take advantage of them when they arise,and superstition says if you make a wish on that star, it'll come true." He pauses before continuing. "Which is better than the other one I've heard." "That I'll die a painful death of poisoning, shooting,beating, and drowning?" "Hypothermia,not drowning." St. Clair laughs. He has a wonderful, boyish laugh. "But no. I've heard anyone who stands here is destined to return to Paris someday. And as I understand it,one year for you is one year to many. Am I right?" I close my eyes. Mom and Seany appear before me. Bridge.Toph.I nod. "All right,then.So keep your eyes closed.And make a wish." I take a deep breath. The cool dampness of the nearby trees fills my lungs. What do I want? It's a difficult quesiton. I want to go home,but I have to admit I've enjoyed tonight. And what if this is the only time in my entire life I visit Paris? I know I just told St. Clair that I don't want to be here, but there's a part of me-a teeny, tiny part-that's curious. If my father called tomorrow and ordered me home,I might be disappointed. I still haven't seen the Mona Lisa. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower.Walked beneath the Arc de Triomphe. So what else do I want? I want to feel Toph's lips again.I want him to wait.But there's another part of me,a part I really,really hate,that knows even if we do make it,I'd still move away for college next year.So I'd see him this Christmas and next summer,and then...would that be it? And then there's the other thing. The thing I'm trying to ignore. The thing I shouldn't want,the thing I can't have. And he's standing in front of me right now. So what do I wish for? Something I'm not sure I want? Someone I'm not sure I need? Or someone I know I can't have? Screw it.Let the fates decide. I wish for the thing that is best for me. How's that for a generalization? I open my eyes,and the wind is blowing harder. St. Clair pushes a strand of hair from his eyes. "Must have been a good one," he says.

One day while I was apologizing to Serennah for not having the money to pay for something that she needed, she pointed out that our lack of finances has kept us humble. We do not have any high-maintenance spoiled brats in this household. We have never missed a meal; some of those blessed meals have consisted of beans and rice (nutritionally okay but harder for Kip to swallow), but we were still thankful. I told our kids that if you have never had your debit card denied while trying to make a purchase, you have not lived! I was joking at the time, but as I thought about it some more, I agreed with Serennah. These humbling moments keep us from getting too proud.

He hadn’t been aware of staring, but when her questioning gaze locked with his, Grey felt as though he’d been smacked upside the head by the open palm of idiocy. “Is something troubling you, Grey?” He loved the sound of his name on her tongue, and hated that he loved it. She made him weak and stupid. One sweet glance from her and he was ready to drop to his knees. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even infatuation. It was pure unmitigated lust. He could admit that. Hell, he embraced it. Lust could be managed. Lust could be mastered. And lust would eventually fade once she was out of his care and out of his life. That was the cold, hard, blessed truth of it. “I was wondering if you were eagerly anticipating Lady Shrewsbury’s ball tomorrow evening?” How easily the lie rolled off his tongue as he lifted a bite of poached salmon to his mouth. She smiled softly, obviously looking forward to it very much. “I am. Thank you.” Camilla shared her daughter’s pleasure judging from her coy grin. “Rose has renewed her acquaintance with the honorable Kellan Maxwell. He requested that she save the first waltz of the evening for him.” The fish caught in Grey’s throat. He took a drink of wine to force it down. “The same Kellan Maxwell who courted you during your first season?” Rose’s smile faded a little. No doubt she heard the censure in his tone, his disapproval. “The same,” she replied with an edge of defensiveness. The same idiot who abandoned his pursuit of Rose when Charles lost everything and scandal erupted. The little prick who hadn’t loved her enough to continue his courtship regardless of her situation. “Mm,” was what he said out loud. Rose scowled at him. “We had no understanding. We were not engaged, and Mr. Maxwell behaved as any other young man with responsibilities would have.” “You defend him.” It was difficult to keep his disappointment from showing. He never thought her to be the kind of woman who would forgive disloyalty when she was so very loyal herself. She tilted her head. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m no debutante, Grey. If I’m to find a husband this season I shouldn’t show prejudice.” Common sense coming out of anyone else. Coming out of her it was shite. “You deserve better.” She smiled a Mona Lisa smile. “We do not always get what we deserve, or even what we desire.” She knew. Christ in a frock coat, she knew. Her smile faded. “If we did, Papa would be here with us, and Mama and I wouldn’t be your responsibility.” She didn’t know. Damn, what a relief. “The two of you are not a responsibility. You are a joy.” For some reason that only made her look sadder, but Camilla smiled through happy tears. She thanked him profusely, but Grey had a hard time hearing what she was saying-he was too intent on Rose, who had turned her attention to her plate and was pushing food around with little interest. He could bear this no longer. He didn’t know what was wrong with her, or why she seemed so strange with him. And he couldn’t stand that he cared. “Ladies, I’m afraid I must beg your pardon and take leave of you.” Rose glanced up. “So soon?” He pushed his chair back from the table. “Yes. But I will see you at breakfast in the morning.” She turned back to her dinner. Grey bid farewell to Camilla and then strode from the room as quickly as he could. If he survived the Season it would be a miracle.