Art Of Suffering Quotes & Sayings

I cannot, as you [Edward Weston] once proposed to me - solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art ... in my case, life is always struggling to predominate and art naturally suffers. — Tina Modotti

It's a folk art of sorts, I said to Hoeller, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one's watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilized in the form of lifelong controlled suffering, it's an art possessed only by this people and those belonging to it. — Thomas Bernhard

I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. — C.S. Lewis

True values entail suffering. That's the way we think. All in all, we tend to view melancholia as more true. We prefer music and art to contain a touch of melancholia. So melancholia in itself is a value. Unhappy and unrequited love is more romantic than happy love. For we don't think that's completely real, do we? ... Longing is true. It may be that there's no truth at all to long for, but the longing itself is true. Just like pain is true. We feel it inside. It's part of our reality. — Lars Von Trier

It was a good thing to be an African. There were terrible things that happened in Africa, things that brought shame and despair when one thought about them, but that was not all there was in Africa. However great the suffering of the people of Africa, however harrowing the cruelty and chaos brought about by soldiers - small boys with guns, really - there was still so much in Africa from which one could take real pride. There was the kindness, for example, and the ability to smile, and the art and the music. — Alexander McCall Smith

I like to describe Himalayan climbing as a kind of art of suffering. Just pushing, pushing yourself to your limits. — Wojciech Kurtyka

The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama. — Madeleine L'Engle

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully. — Alain De Botton

There is today, every day, set before thee good and evil, life and death
choose thou. For only self can separate you from the love of the Father. For it should be manifested to thee that thou art conscious in a living world, aware of suffering, of sorrow, of joy, of pleasure. These, to be sure, are the price one pays for having will, knowledge. But let that knowledge be spent in a way and manner to help others. For as ye do to thy fellow man ye do to thy Maker. — Edgar Cayce

The art of happiness is also the art of suffering well. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism - in terms of human suffering - is the belief that love is a matter of "the heart," not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. — Ayn Rand

Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer. — Art Buchwald

No wise forward look can ignore the possibility of many sorrows and the certainty of some. Hope has ever something of dread in her eyes. The road will not be always bright and smooth, but will sometimes plunge down into grim cations, where no sunbeams reach. But even that anticipation may be calm. "Thou art with me" is enough. He who guides into the gorge will guide through it. It is not a cul de sac, shut in with precipices, at the far end; but it opens out on shining tablelands, where there is greener pasture. — Alexander MacLaren

Art doesn't depend on suffering. That's a crock. It's about discipline. Showing up to do the thing you do. It's about watching and listening to the world and telling the truth with your own voice. It's about learning from what other people make, whether it's good or bad. And the most important thing? It's about taking care of yourself. So you can keep making and finishing your shit, for as long as you can. — J.C. Lillis

For one thing, I don't think art needs to be about suffering; sometimes it really seems like it's only the art about pain that is interpreted as profound, and in my work for years I've really tried to deal with subjects that are substantial, not just fluffy, but presented in a more playful, approachable kind of way. — Ellen Forney

It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors. — Wynton Marsalis

Do I suffer for my art? Well, I get a lot of flatulence when I'm nervous. — Martin Clunes

Sometimes I think my scars are beautiful, but then I remember not everyone shares the same love of art. — Piper Payne

Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157) — Martha Zamora

It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art. — Hermann Bahr

Breathing in, I'm aware of the painful feeling in me. Breathing out, I'm aware of the painful feeling in me. This is an art. We have to learn it, because most of us don't like to be with our pain. We're afraid of being overwhelmed by the pain, so we always seek to run away from it. There's loneliness, fear, anger, and despair in us. Mostly we try to cover it up by consuming. There are those of us who go and look for something to eat. Others turn on the television. In fact, many people do both at the same time. And even if the TV program isn't interesting at all, we don't have the courage to turn it off, because if we turn it off, we have to go back to ourselves and encounter the pain inside. The marketplace provides us with many items to help us in our effort to avoid the suffering inside. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I'm sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn't make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering. — Rita Mae Brown

Let us seek the respite where it is - in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all. — Albert Camus

For me, spirit is the impulse towards life, the Eros in a person leaping forward, whereas soul refers to something possibly long.. suffering, where meanings are made, where there is a sense of this gathering of perceptions, that our death is not the most important thing, nor our life. — Michael Leunig

In human life and in the history of faith, I think, love has a quality of a bedrock reality we discover - adventurers, travelers, each of us, only fitfully apprehending its potential. I take some solace in the fact that I'm not alone in this intuition that the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering notwithstanding, "at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love." That's how Desmond Tutu put it to me, with greater authority than mine from a life that has known extremes of human cruelty one to another. — Krista Tippett

We have to learn the art of stopping - stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace. We turn on the TV and then we turn it off. We pick up a book and then we put it down. How can we stop this state of agitation? How How can we stop our fear, despair, anger, and craving? We can stop by practicing mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful smiling, and deep looking in order to understand. When we are mindful, touching deeply the present moment, the fruits are always understanding, acceptance, love, and the desire to relieve suffering and bring joy. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Great art suspends the reverted eye, the lamented past, the anticipated future: we enter with it into the timeless present; we are with God today, perfect in our manner and mode, open to the riches and the glories of a realm that time forgot, but that great art reminds us of: not by its content, but by what it does in us: suspends the desire to be elsewhere. And thus it undoes the agitated grasping in the heart of the suffering self, and releases us - maybe for a second, maybe for a minute, maybe for all eternity - releases us from the coil of ourselves. — Ken Wilber

Perhaps no line of Cohen's better captures the essence of his vision. He is telling his listeners what prophetically inclined rabbis have been telling theirs for thousands of years, namely that the world is a place of suffering, that no celestial cataclysm could ever change that, but that there are things here on this earth - art, love, friendship, kindness, music, sex - that have the power to redeem us. — Liel Leibovitz

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first. — Cesare Pavese

THE ART OF OFFERING HAPPINESS In a friendship, we try to to offer our friend happiness. Sometimes you think that you're doing something for someone else's happiness, when actually your action is making them suffer. The willingness to make someone happy isn't enough. You have your own idea of happiness. But to make someone else happy, you have to understand that person's needs, suffering, and desires and not assume you know what will make them happy. Ask, What would make you happy? — Thich Nhat Hanh

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists. — Henry Miller

Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea which, if we turn to contemplate it, immediately gives us joy instead of the pain which we were feeling before - indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they reflect and thus joyously to people our lives with divinities. — Marcel Proust

I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful.
Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me. — Nikki Rowe

Think of this: If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no van Gogh, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong. The civilization that devises the infrastructure to allow these wonderful things to be created is essentially a product of war - death and suffering - and commerce - deceit and inequality. Even your liberty to discuss the shortcomings of your own species has its foundations in blood and hardship." "That's a depressing thought, — Jasper Fforde

Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you — Ginnetta Correli

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? — John Keats

I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters. — Marilyn Manson

You do not need to be temperamental or upset to be a novelist. Don't embrace the tortured artist rhetoric that any life difficulties might serve to benefit and enhance your writing. That's damaging. Counterintuitive. Writing can be so incredibly lonely, and when you're alone with your thoughts for long enough to produce a hundred thousand words of your own headspace, it can be scary. Suffering is not good for your art. Mental health care is. So talk to someone other than your future readers about the problems you are facing. Someone you know and trust. There is no shame in asking for help. — Bryant A. Loney

Creativity is not the work of a few. We each carry within us the image of God the Creator; we each have the task of making the earth into a fairer, kinder place. The first step is imagining a better world, and that is most apt to happen when we suffer or look on suffering. — Elizabeth O'Connor

There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Mine is the art of inspiring people to turn themselves inside out, transform their suffering into art, their art into awareness and their awareness into action — Gabrielle Roth

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. — David Foster Wallace

Art. If you don't understand the roots of his suffering, — Thich Nhat Hanh

Ellis and I had debated: Should we show the bad as well, or only the good? I said only the good. Why should Skylar's suffering linger on? Why not let her rest, celebrate her life? But Ellis said showing the suffering was important because somewhere in that crowd tonight, someone else suffered, too. Someone would see those photos of her pain and feel a resonance. The point of art, of any communion between human beings, wasn't to make people feel good - it was to make them feel less alone. — Leah Raeder

[Dionysos'] being torn into pieces, the genuine Dionysiac suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, so that we are to regard the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering ... In the view described here we already have all the constituent elements of a profound way of looking at the world and thus, at the same time, the doctrine of the Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken, a premonition of unity restored. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Suffering is the price of being alive, and it is music and singing and art that has helped me live through some of the most difficult things that have happened to me. — Judy Collins

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other's throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting - an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment. — Chaim Potok

The whole art of living is to regard people who cause us suffering as, in a degree, enabling us to accept its divine form and thus to populate our daily life with divinities. — Marcel Proust

Don't throw away your suffering. Touch your suffering. Face it directly, and your joy will become deeper. You know that suffering and joy are both impermanent. Learn the art of cultivating joy. Practice like this, and you come to the third turning of the Third Noble Truth, the "Realization" that suffering and happiness are not two. When you reach this stage, your joy is no longer fragile. It is true joy. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Spirituality is nothing more than the art of paying attention. When I give my whole heart and mind to a task such as singing - life's worry, suffering, or conflicts don't exist in that moment. Additionally, singing is about breath work, which is the most essential practice to living a conscious & healthy life. — Jason Mraz

From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections. — Criss Jami

Till thou hast learned to suffer from a saint a well as from the wicked, and to be abused by the godly as well as the ungodly, never look to live a contented or comfortable life, nor ever think thou has truly learned the art of suffering (383). — Richard Baxter

We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life. — Jack Kornfield

The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great. — Freya Stark

Why Dream?
Life is a difficult assignment. We are fragile creatures, expected to function at high rates of speed, and asked to accomplish great and small things each day. These daily activities take enormous amounts of energy. Most things are out of our control. We are surrounded by danger, frustration, grief, and insanity as well as love, hope, ecstasy, and wonder. Being fully human is an exercise in humility, suffering, grace, and great humor. Things and people all around us die, get broken, or are lost. There is no safety or guarantees.
The way to accomplish the assignment of truly living is to engage fully, richly, and deeply in the living of your dreams. We are made to dream and to live those dreams. — SARK

We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP. — Henry Rollins

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history. — Joseph Brodsky

Three hundred nights like three hundred walls
must rise between my love and me
and the sea will be a black art between us.
Time with a hard hand will tear out
the streets tangled in my breast.
Nothing will be left but memories.
(O afternoons earned with suffering,
nights hoping for the sight of you,
dejected vacant lots, poor sky
shamed in the bottom of the puddles
like a fallen angel ...
And your life that graces my desire
and that run-down and lighthearted neighborhood
shining today in the glow of my love ... )
Final as a statue
your absence will sadden other fields. — Jorge Luis Borges

The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another. — W. H. Auden

Prayer Against the Darkness
Shekhina
Pray for us now
bound with scripture
and shielded with shawl
Armed with passion
and loving care
Pray for us now
against suffering, turmoil, and injustice
Pray for us now
against the chaos of the dark. — Leonard Nimoy

There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death. — Hippocrates

My existence is such that "I" do not really exist. At the end of understanding so much I understand that I know nothing. I suffer for being surrounded by intense suffering and yet I'm deeply suspicious if first of all there is indeed any consciousness except me. I strive to find the artist who might have fathered this great universal art but feel myself to be too feeble to accomplish this seemingly unattainable mission. Yet I have every respect for life, and it is this sheer respect that makes me live. — Kedar Joshi

Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent. To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative. It — Viktor E. Frankl

Common one, my illuminated one, oh my high in the art of suffering. Take a walk with me. — Van Morrison

Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has 'cast up' in my time or is like to
this art by which even the 'poor' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country? — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Effort and pain may not be avoided. Physical and psychological breakdowns occur. The support of a like-minded group, dedicated to The Art of Suffering, provides a safety net. An individual will push harder and risk more in the company of trustworthy peers ... — Mark Twight

There is something embarrassing in ... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. — Theodor Adorno

The problem has to be answered by means of art, because you can't blast them with bliss. Tat freaks them out even more. So instead, you have to have an artful way of approaching them. You do a dance for them, you get them to imagine being interconnected, and to imagine being free of their suffering, and not so self involved, through art that draws them out. Then you, and they, are all established in what's called a Buddha-verse, or Buddha-land — Robert Thurman

And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzling over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own. — Hermann Hesse

Whether you create, or you observe an objective piece of creativity, meditation should be the key. Without it, mind can only spread on the canvas its nightmares. Most of the paintings of the great painters like Paul Gaugin or Picasso are almost like vomit. They could not contain their agony and suffering - it was so much they threw it on the canvas to get relief. The real objective art is not a relief; it is not a sickness that you want to get rid of. It is a blissfulness that you want to share. And by sharing, it grows; you have more of it, the more it is shared. — Rajneesh

The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose and mouth that compose a sitter's face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw. — Anthony Marra

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. — Jennifer Birkett

But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative - the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory - it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we're to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. — Michael Copperman

I've been very fortunateit's just been an amazing piece of luck. I haven't had to suffer for my art but I've suffered enough inside to hopefully be called an artist. — Christopher Plummer

EPICURUS WROTE, "Empty is that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul. — Martha C. Nussbaum

No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place. — Elfriede Jelinek

I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries, there's this whole mythology of the wounded artist: that you can't really do any great art unless you're suffering. — Joel Kinnaman

The light of artistic creation is also blinding.
The artist can't see the suffering he causes
to those around him. And the'll never
understand the purity of his goal, how the heat
of his invention won't melt the ice in his heart.
He must be ruthless!
No religion, no purpose except this:
Make something perfect before you die.
Life is short, art is for all time — Ian McEwan

If to "aestheticize" is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be revealed and dismantled - much hangs on the words "merely" and "rather than." Opportunism isn't the same as committed attention. But we can also define the "aesthetic" not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what's still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched. — Adrienne Rich

As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that. — Philip Pullman

In the late '70s, the conditions that bands had to endure were, shall we say, not as civilized as they are today. People were a lot more aggressive back then. So there was definitely a lot of suffering for your art. But I would argue that was a good thing. Generally, people make better music when they suffer. — Peter Hook

The general that hearkens to my counsel and acts upon it, will conquer: let such a one be retained in command! The general that hearkens not to my counsel nor acts upon it, will suffer defeat: - let such a one be dismissed! — Sun Tzu

When you are around people who are really suffering, you get to experience some of their suffering and that can make you stronger in your faith. — Art Hochberg

Suffering has its beneficial aspects. It can be an excellent teacher. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Suffering is not holding you. You are holding suffering. When you become good at the art of letting sufferings go, then you'll come to realize how unnecessary it was for you to drag those burdens around with you. You'll see that no one else other than you was responsible. The truth is that existence wants your life to become a festival. — Rajneesh

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
— Henri Frederic Amiel

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. — Sontag, Susan

Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art. — Jay McInerney

Art with a big "A" is for museums, galleries, critics, and collectors. art with a small "a" is for the rest of us. Art is a business, an industry, a racket. art is about passion, love, life, humanity - everything that is truly valuable. Art is sold, resold, put under the gavel, and insured up the wazoo. art with a small "a" is not a product. It's a point of view. It's a way of life. Art is made by trained professionals and experts. art is made by accountants, farmers, and stay-at-home moms at restaurant tables, in parking lots, and laundry rooms. Art takes Art School and Talent and years of Suffering and Sacrifice. art just takes desire and 15 minutes a day. You may not be an Artist. Big whoop. But I know you can make art - with a wonderful, expressive, teeny, tiny a. — Danny Gregory

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer. — Lydia Millet

[ ... ] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness. — Albert Camus

Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered.
He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still
die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish
arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the world will remain and,
no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. Dimitri Karamazov's cry of "Why?"
will continue to resound; art and rebellion will die only with the last man. — Albert Camus

As far as stimulus from the visual arts specifically, there is today in most of us a visual appetite that is hungry, that is acutely undernourished. One might go so far as to say that Protestants in particular suffer from a form of visual anorexia. It is not that there is a lack of visual stimuli, but rather a lack of wholesomeness of form and content amidst the all-pervasive sensory overload. — John Walford

I once heard some idiot on the radio saying that all great art has suffering as its dominant theme, and that the greatest artists are only able to create because they suffer immensely in their own lives. What a bunch of bullshit. Look at Van Gogh's paintings: there's as much joy in them as there is pain. Suffering is only a single color, and by itself it's boring. — Bart Yates

Reality in movies is the reality of the story you're telling, so it may not match the reality as we know it, but the reason there's art is that it tries to bring some kind of understanding of all the suffering and joys and pain that we go through. Storytelling brings some value to it. — Caleb Deschanel

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad ... ; one suffers through the many for the few. — Randall Jarrell

We poets don't tend to be certain a lot. Much of our art is made out of our own uncertainty. And there is a not-knowingness, I think, that leads us back to suffering humanity with a more compassionate vision than most of our politicians have. — Sam Hamill

The highest art is where has been most perfectly breathed the sentiment of humanity ... Some persons suppose that landscape has no power of communicating human sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can: and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant. Every act of man, every thing of labor, effort, suffering, want, anxiety, necessity, love, marks itself wherever it has been. — George Inness