Cave Art Quotes & Sayings

With Tommy, gift-giving is an art form. Whatever he bestows on you is more likely than not going to be something absurd and cheap and tacky, but the way he offers it always makes you feel as if you were receiving an oblation. I don't know how he does it. It's a bizarre kind of magic; he somehow makes you believe that the useless thing in his outstretched hands is actually a chunk of his heart that he's torn out, just for you. He holds it up for your inspection, and it glows between his fingers like a candle in a cave. And as if that weren't enough, he makes it absolutely clear that he doesn't want anything in return, not even your gratitude, so all you can do is stand there with a stupefied look on your face and humbly accept what he's vouchsafing you. — Bart Yates

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing. — Toni Morrison

Outside the world of politics, one person in the world of the arts I would mention as an influence is Nick Cave, another person who has been around since the late 1970s. He has developed and changed remarkably, whilst remaining true to his vision. He has been a great help to me as well, without his knowing it. — Nick Cave

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind. — Lewis Mumford

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. — Marshall McLuhan

Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public. — Simon McBurney

One of the effects of indoctrination, of passing into the anglo-centrism of British West Indian culture, is that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King's English and in the proper forms of expression. Or else your writing is not literature; it is folklore, or worse. And folklore can never be art. Read some poetry by West Indian writers
some, not all
and you will see what I mean. The reader has to dissect anglican stanza after anglican stanza for Caribbean truth, and may never find it. The anglican ideal
Milton, Wordsworth, Keats
was held before us with an assurance that we were unable, and would never be able, to achieve such excellence. We crouched outside the cave. — Michelle Cliff

Art ... is a force which blows the roof off the cave where we crouch imprisoned. — Ernest Hello

The work ethic at art school is completely different than the work ethic amongst people who get into music. People who paint, it's an honorable thing to spend all day and all night in front of your canvas - that is the romantic vision of the painter. — Nick Cave

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities. — Eric Hoffer

We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe. — Kevin Rudd

All art, from the paintings on the walls of cave dwellers to art created today, is autobiographical because it comes from the secret place in the soul where imagination resides. — Gloria Vanderbilt

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. — Susan Sontag

It was about the preciousness of that, and how they viewed those birds as art, as something valuable. I didn't care one way or another back then, but now, thinking about my grandparents - who are still alive but getting older - I see the birds as sort of time capsules. Now I go home during the holidays and they hold a lot of weight in terms of nostalgia and memory. Now they mean everything. — Nick Cave

When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better. — Werner Herzog

I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange. — Nick Cave

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon's public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind's gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind's self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation's effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls. — Kilroy J. Oldster

As animals have no idea of the holy or the devil, they have no idea of the beautiful. The opinion held by some scientists that apes could paint, based on the 'paintings' apes had done, proved to be quite wrong. It has been confirmed that apes only imitate man. So- called 'ape art' surely does not exist. On the contrary, the cave men from Cromagnon onward knew how to paint and care. Their drawings have been found in caves of the Sahara, in Spain at Altamira, in Franc at Lascaux, and recently in Poland at Mashicka. Many of these pictures are thought to be more than 30,000 years old. Some time ago, a group of Soviet archeologists discovered a set of musical instruments, made 20,000 years ago, near the town of Chernigov in the Ukraine. — Alija Izetbegovic

It was a clear autumn day Sunday in 1876; Vincent van Gogh, twenty-three years old, left the English boarding school where he was teaching to give a sermon at a small Methodist church in Richmond, a humble London suburb. Standing in front of the lectern, he felt like a lost soul emerging from the dark cave in which he had been buried.

The sermon, which survives among Vincent's collected letters, reiterates universal ideas and is not an outstanding example of the art of homiletics. Nevertheless, his words grew out of his tormented life and had an intense emotional charge. Preaching to the congregation, he was also preaching to himself -- and of himself. The images he used were the same as those that were to be given powerful expression in his pictures.

The text chosen for the sermon was Psalm 119:19, 'I am a stranger on the earth, hide not Thy commandments from me.' — Albert J. Lubin

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. — Camille Paglia

I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music. — Nick Cave

For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses around a bright red cave), and addressed themselves the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart. — Virginia Woolf

What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by. — Nick Cave

The endlessness of the extent of that whistle resulted, without a doubt, also in an enormous metaphysical knowledge of the art of whistling, which mingled, not just with the hearing of people, but extended, in an incisive manner, to the depths of their souls, the protected corner where each one hid their things- that frightening cave, which many call the centre of their being. — Ondjaki

For me, I think [art] exists in a cave. I am in a cave. I have my own editing place, but I'm not powerful enough to amass the resources to keep doing movies every two or three years. — Haile Gerima