Quotes & Sayings About Child Art

When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. — Pablo Picasso

Why didn't you become a sorcerer, Geralt? Weren't you ever attracted by the Art? Be honest.'
'I will. I was.'
'Why, then, didn't you follow the voice of that attraction?'
'I decided it would be wiser to follow the voice of good sense.'
'Meaning?'
'Years of practice in the witcher's trade have taught me not to bite off more than I can chew. Do you know, Vilgefortz, I once knew a dwarf, who, as a child, dreamed of being an elf. What do you think; would he have become one had he followed the voice of attraction? — Andrzej Sapkowski

Being a parent is not just about how you treat your child; it's also about how you treat the other parent. If you treat that person with respect, that's fine, that's the way to go. But if you don't, you're not being the parent you could be. — Art Alexakis

I've gone to work, I've raised a child, and I've spent 30 years trying to better the lives of children and families. But I often return to one thing I said way back then - that politics is the art of making possible what appears to be impossible. — Hillary Clinton

I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things - that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art. — Osamu Dazai

I grew up in Rome, in actually what I would say was a liberal, open-minded family. My father was an architect and my mother was a teacher of art history, so it was sort of intellectual, and maybe a bit much for me when I was a child. — Frida Giannini

Every child should try everything: sport, music, art, mathematics; they can do it all. Copying and competition are now seen as twin evils, but they are both useful tools. — Tony Buzan

But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose everyday life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning? — George MacDonald

I think every young child can learn through any martial art. They would then learn to respect their life, respect their parents, respect their country, and respect the whole world. — Jackie Chan

Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her. — Anais Nin

The biggest mistake that parents make, is believing that their assigned task in life is to teach their children and to guide them in every situation of their children's lives. The truth is that it is the task of parents to both learn from their children and to guide them as well. Parenting is a relationship that goes both ways, from the moment your child is born, you learn from that person, and in fact, your lessons begin long before your child's lessons do. Later on, when you've learned a great deal already, then they begin to learn from you. Throughout our lives, it is a give-and-take relationship, in many ways. Our assigned task is to learn from our children, and to guide and teach them. Their assigned task is to learn from us, and also to teach us. — C. JoyBell C.

Meditation is the art of cleaning your mirror from all the dust that the society, the religion, the educational system has poured on you, to take away everything that has not been born with you, to bring you to your absolute innocence as you were born as a child. — Rajneesh

I think that the most important requirement is to capture the essence of a piece of art. You look at it, essentially absorb it, and you have to be able to understand it visually without having to think about how it was done. I was already able to do that as a child. — Wolfgang Beltracchi

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words. — C.S. Lewis

I had been reading children's books all my life and saw them not as minor amusements but as part of the whole literary mainstream; not as "juveniles" or "kiddie lit," one of the most demeaning terms in the scholastic jargon.
My belief was, and is, that the child's book is a unique and valid art form; a means of dealing with things which cannot be dealt with quite as well in any other way. There is, I'm convinced, no inner, qualitative difference between writing for adults and writing for children. The raw materials are the same for both: the human condition and our response to it. — Lloyd Alexander

My child has to be an artist,
because conceiving her will be the best art
my body has ever accommodated. — Nomthandazo Tsembeni

All my life I have refused to be for or against parties, for or against nations, for or against people. I never seek novelty or the eccentric; I do not go from land to land to contrast civilizations. I seek only, wherever I go, for symbols of greatness, and as I have already said, they may be found in the eyes of a child, in the movement of a gladiator, in the heart of a gypsy, in twilight in Ireland or in moonrise over the deserts. To hold the spirit of greatness is in my mind what the world was created for. The human body is beautiful as this spirit shines through, and art is great as it translates and embodies this spirit. — Robert Henri

I did this Super-8 film at art school called 'Tissues,' this black comedy about a family whose father has been arrested for child molestation. I was absolutely thrilled by every inch of it, and would throw my projector in the back of my car and show it to anybody who would watch it. — Jane Campion

It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor - this stands for that - is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pig skin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined. — Michael Pollan

I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading. — Gerald Murnane

You are young men and not children. The idea is that art allows the child imprisoned inside the adult to come out to play and celebrate the world and its beauty." He said that art was intimately linked with immortality: a challenge to death and time, a celebration of life. — Sinan Antoon

Let every young man and woman be warned by my example, and understand that good handwriting is a necessary part of education. I am now of the opinion that children should first be taught the art of drawing before learning how to write. Let the child learn his letters by observation as he does different objects, such as flowers, birds, etc., and let him learn handwriting only after he has learnt to draw objects. He will then write a beautifully formed hand. — Mahatma Gandhi

In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. — Julia Child

The art of Montessori, which simply means finding the best way to help the child himself become what he was meant to become from the first moment of conception, is an art that joins home and school. That means parent and teacher supporting one another in their responsibility to the life of the child. — Maria Montessori

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses
those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence. — Richard Ford

A child her wayward pencil drew
On margins of her book;
Garlands of flower, dancing elves,
Bud, butterfly, and brook,
Lessons undone, and plum forgot,
Seeking with hand and heart
The teacher whom she learned to love
Before she knew t'was Art. — Louisa May Alcott

It's not the job of the child to make the parent happy. It's the job of the parent to take care of their own happiness. — Art Hochberg

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about. — Carl Andre

When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject. — Madeleine L'Engle

I'm scared and overwhelmed and my mind is racing. But," she paused and looked at him. "You're here. You just gave me hope. You also just scared the blazes out of me. I'm no longer sure that I'm the most difficult person in this relationship."
"I remain sure of it," Alain said.
"Did you just make a joke?" She pulled away a little and stared at him, smiling more like she usually did. "Are you making fun of me, Mage?"
Alain couldn't remember how long it had been since he had laughed. The act was completely alien to Mages, to the training he had endured since he was a small child. But now he laughed, the sound rusty and halting, yet he knew it was a laugh, and it felt so good to be laughing and holding Mari that Alain wondered what Mage art or other promised reward could possibly be worth giving up such things. — Jack Campbell

Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

O gentle vision in the dawn:
My spirit over faint cool water glides,
Child of the day,
To thee;
And thou art drawn
By kindred impulse over silver tides
The dreamy way
To me. — Harold Monro

What inspired me as a child is the same thing that inspires me now: being nice. I always try to one up everybody with verses and be lyrical and just stand for the art. — Joell Ortiz

[The child] must be warned that her truth will undoubtedly make some people uneasy and angry, so she'll need to share it strategically, perhaps through art, which God offers as a safe way to express joy and madness. And she'll need a trusted person to help her find her medium, so she won't feel that she has to hide or hold her breath any longer. Because when she exhales, she'll discover that she's created the space to inhale again, and that will keep her going. And this, the importance of this lesson, is why I became a teacher. — Glennon Doyle Melton

I remembered the taste of good Italian coffee in my London flat, brewed at the expense of time and a good deal of mess, compared to the sort that came out of machines in the office at the press of a button. I remembered walking to art school, through the windy winter, over hills and heaths: how much gladder I was to reach the rich warmth and to toast my hands on a radiator, than if I had gone by car. I remembered the nickels my father gave me as a child for being good: how much more I valued them than I would a dollar bill given all at once for no reason. Of course God as the ultimate parent could give happiness for the asking, just as my father could have given a handful of dollar bills, but at the age of five would I have known its value, or would it have looked to me just like a wad of grubby green paper? — Sumangali Morhall

My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.' — N. Scott Momaday

Sixty-nine was an interesting age
an age of infinite possibilities
an age when at last the experience of a lifetime was beginning to tell. But to feel old
that was different, a tired, discouraged state of mind when one was inclined to ask oneself depressing questions. What was he after all? A little dried-up elderly man, with neither chick nor child, with no human belongings, only a valuable Art collection which seemed at the moment strangely unsatisfying. No one to care whether he lived or died ... — Agatha Christie

If you think your child's academic studies are more important than the arts, think again. — Plato

I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true. — Paul Gauguin

For what is more foolish than for a man to study nothing else than how to please himself? To make himself the object of his own admiration? And yet, what is there that is either delightful or taking, nay rather what not the contrary, that a man does against the hair? Take away this salt of life, and the orator may even sit still with his action, the musician with all his division will be able to please no man, the player be hissed off the stage, the poet and all his Muses ridiculous, the painter with his art contemptible, and the physician with all his slip-slops go a-begging. Lastly, you will be taken for an ugly fellow instead of youthful, and a beast instead of a wise man, a child instead of eloquent, and instead of a well-bred man, a clown. So necessary a thing it is that everyone flatter himself and commend himself to himself before he can be commended by others. — Erasmus

The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is. — Robert M. Pirsig

Fucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of doing it and the way it should be done, is like the difference between a child's first drawing and a picture by the world's greatest painter. — Anais Nin

The heart of the Waldorf method is that education is an art-it must speak to the child's experience. To educate the whole child, his heart and his will must be reached, as well as the mind. — Rudolf Steiner

He tossed a word like a ball, never letting it fall. Instead it swam in the air, without care, strung together with an art that came straight from his heart. — David Paul Kirkpatrick

The hidden child wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer. — Christian Morgenstern

Homosexuality is the most beautiful aspect of humanity. For its existence is proof that altruism is natural; it is to demonstrate that the theory of the "survival of the fittest" can only apply to the species as a whole, and that reproduction is insufficient to secure our place in the great jungle of life, which means being nice is a more stable evolutionary strategy than making kids; and if the homosexual is attracted to religion or to art - or, in smaller societies, to shamanism or caring for other people's children - is this not due to his or her search for purpose? If so, then what we call purpose must be something that encompasses all modes of life. What we call love must be greater than child rearing or caring for a mate. — Anthony Marais

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help. — Langston Hughes

Too much trouble,' 'Too expensive,' or 'Who will know the difference' are death knells for good food ... Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes. — Julia Child

We are taught to say, "Our Father," but still it is, "Our Father who art in heaven. " Familiarity there may be, but holy familiarity; boldness, but the boldness which springs from grace and is the work of the Spirit; not the boldness of the rebel who carries a brazen front in the presence of his offended king, but the boldness of the child who fears because he loves, and loves because he fears. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason.
I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears. — Erich Fromm

As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love. — Richard Louv

Eternity.-Thy name Or glad, or fearful, we pronounce, as thoughts Wandering in darkness shape thee. Thou strange being, Which art and must be, yet which contradict'st All sense, all reasoning,-thou, who never wast Less than thyself, and who still art thyself Entire, though the deep draught which Time has taken Equals thy present store-No line can reach To thy unfathomed depths. The reasoning sage Who can dissect a sunbeam, count the stars, And measure distant worlds, is here a child, And, humbled, drops his calculating pen. — Anna Letitia Barbauld

That's why Camilla and I got married," said Denniston as they drove off. "We both like Weather. Not this or that kind of weather, but just Weather. It's a useful taste if one lives in England."
"How ever did you learn to do that, Mr. Denniston?" said Jane. "I don't think I should ever learn to like rain and snow."
"It's the other way around," said Denniston. "Everyone begins as a child by liking Weather. You learn the art of disliking it as you grow up. Haven't you ever noticed it on a snowy day? The grown-ups are all going about with long faces, but look at the children--and the dogs? They know what snow's made for. — C.S. Lewis

Mama, Mama, help me get home
I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.
I found me a werewolf, a nasty old mutt
It showed me its teeth and went straight for my gut.
Mama, Mama, help me get home
I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.
I was stopped by a vampire, a rotting old wreck
It showed me its teeth and went straight for my neck.
Mama, Mama, put me to bed
I won't make it home, I'm already half-dead.
I met an Invalid, and fell for his art
He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.
-From "A Child's Walk Home," Nursery Rhymes and Folk Tales — Lauren Oliver

His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. — G.K. Chesterton

I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble. — Jenny Saville

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation. — Ezra Pound

For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art. — Jacques Audiard

Mastering the Art of French Cooking ... doesn't mean it has to be fancy cooking, although it can be as elaborate as you wish. — Julia Child

If one takes meaning into consideration, happiness might best be described as "a zest for life in all its complexity," as Sissela Bok writes in her book. To achieve it means to "attach our lives to something larger than ourselves." To be happy, one must do. It could be something as simple as teaching Sunday school or as grand as leading nonviolent protests. It could be as cerebral as seeking the cure for cancer or as physical as climbing mountains. It could be creating art. And it could be raising a child - my "best piece of poetrie," as Ben Jonson said in his elegy for his seven-year-old son. — Jennifer Senior

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. — Jasper Johns

A Book of Glass
On the table, a book of glass. In the book only a few pages with no words But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to pieces in diagonal Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve fractures lines to
elisions.

The last pages are simplest. They can be read backwards and
thoroughly. Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic. He who wrote it was very ambitious, fed up, and finished. He had been teaching the insides and outsides of things

To children, teaching the art of Rembrandt to them. His two wives were beautiful and Death begins As a beggar beside them. What is an abstract persona? A painter visits but he prefers to look at perfume in vials.

And I see a book in glass - the words go off In wild loops without words. I should Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says each child Will receive the book of etchings, but the book will be
incomplete, after all.
But I will make the book of glass. — David Shapiro

Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child. — Erica Jong

No one should ever imitate the style of another because, with regard to art, he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature. — Leonardo Da Vinci

In the art of love," she said thoughtfully, "you are the best I've ever seen. You are stronger than others, more agile, more willing. Well have you learned my art, Siddhartha. Some day, when I am older, I wish to bear your child. And yet all this time, beloved, you have remained a Samana. Even now you do not love me; you love no one. Is it not so?" "It may be so," Siddhartha said wearily. "I am like you. You, too, do not love - how else could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people of our sort are incapable of love. The child people can love; that is their secret. — Hermann Hesse

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The child will leave the nest. The best paint job will crack. The best play will become boring. The best work will grow tedious. The best art will lose meaning. The greatest creation will decay. Behind all this, lies my true self. — Vironika Tugaleva

THE ART OF THE BRICK exhibition is accessible because it engages the child in all of us while simultaneously illuminating sophisticated and complex concepts. Everyone can relate to the medium since it is a toy that many children have at home. But my goal with this exhibition when it first debuted in 2007 was to elevate this simple plaything to a place it has never been before. — Nathan Sawaya

I suppose I was artistic as a child. Our house was so full of art and artists that it never occurred to me not to be constantly making things. I just assumed that all kids liked to work with their hands as much as I did. I was an only child so I did have a lot of time to be creative by myself and with my parents. — Wendy Froud

It takes a while to master the art of hammock-lounging. At first I could only manage five minutes or so before I thought I ought to get out and go and help a child learn how to swim or something. But after observing the Mexicans' capability for staring into space for hours on end, I decided to put in some proper practice. — Tom Hodgkinson

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy. — John Updike

Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange beasts. 'Beetle reads an ass called Brownin', and M'Turk reads an ass called Ruskin; and-'
'Ruskin isn't an ass,' said M'Turk. 'He's almost as good as the Opium-Eater. He says we're "children of noble races, trained by surrounding art." That means me, and the way I decorated the study when you two badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading or I'll shove a pilchard down your neck! — Rudyard Kipling

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. — Wassily Kandinsky

I was raised around a lot of artists, musicians, photographers, painters and people that were in theater. Just having the art-communal hippie experience as a child, there wasn't a clear line that was drawn. We celebrated creative experience and creative expression. We didn't try and curtail it and stunt any of that kind of growth. — Jared Leto

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers
if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes. — Dorothy L. Sayers

So perhaps the reason I shuddered at the idea of writing something about 'Christian art' is that to paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birth-giver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command. Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says 'Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.' And the artist either says 'My soul doth magnify the Lord' and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessicarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary. — Madeleine L'Engle

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling. — Andrea A. Lunsford

The art of bread making can become a consuming hobby, and no matter how often and how many kinds of bread one has made, there always seems to be something new to learn. — Julia Child

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,

Who was the Future, died full long ago.

Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,

Poor, child, and be not to thyself abhorred.

Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow

And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;

The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord

And the long strips of river-silver flow:

Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.

Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight

About their fragile hairs' aerial gold.

Thou art divine, thou livest, - as of old

Apollo springing naked to the light,

And all his island shivered into flowers. — Trumbull Stickney

Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe. — Michelle Phan

Being a child that grew up with a single mom back in the '70s, Father's Day to me was always a very uncomfortable time. At school, we would make Father's Day cards for our dads, and I usually mailed one to my dad, and he hardly ever responded. — Art Alexakis

When the spirit of child's play enters into the creative process, it's a wonderful force and something to be nurtured. — Joni Mitchell

I write for the child in everybody,that part of us that is aware and open and courageous. It's also that part of us that isn't afraid to explore the mythical depths, that vast part of ourselves we know little about and which we often fear because we can't manipulate or control it. That's where art is born. — Madeleine L'Engle

Art is central to all our lives, not just the better-off and educated ... I know that from my own story, and from the evidence of every child ever born - they all want to hear and to tell stories, to sing, to make music, to act out little dramas, to paint pictures, to make sculptures. This is born in and we breed it out. And then, when we have bred it out, we say that art is elitist, and at the same time we either fetishize art - the high prices, the jargon, the inaccessibility - or we ignore it. The truth is, artist or not, we are all born on the creative continuum, and that is a heritage and a birthright of all of our lives. — Jeanette Winterson

In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage. — Arlie Russell Hochschild

Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child. — Peter Schjeldahl

All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive. — Gene Wolfe

What are you doing with the child?" I inquired cautiously.
"I'm teachin' young James here the fine art of not pissing on his feet," he explained. — Diana Gabaldon

My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school! — Natalie Babbitt

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer. — Ma Jian

One painter ought never to imitate the manner of any other; because in that case he cannot be called the child of nature, but the grandchild. It is always best to have recourse to nature, which is replete with such abundance of objects, than to the productions of other masters, who learnt everything from her. — Leonardo Da Vinci

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up. — Charles Morgan

I was a child of a single mother/art teacher, and a father who was an architect, so I've always been around the combination of art, fine art, and architecture my entire life. — James Pearse Connelly

My own life is wonderful, but if I had to live the life of someone else, I'd gladly choose that of Julia Child or Dr. Seuss: two outrageously original people, each of whom fashioned an idiosyncratic wisdom, passion for life, and sense of humor into an art form that anyone and everyone could savor. — Julia Glass

I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials. — William S. Burroughs

We need to understand that every time an elementary teacher captures the imagination of a child through the arts or music of language this nation gets a little stronger. — Richard Riley

Art is the child of Nature. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

How could the prisoner break his chains? I pictured a world, a righteous world, with no sin, no bonds, no social obligations; a world throbbing with creativity, innovation, and thought, nothing else; a world of dedicated solitude, without father, mother, wife, or child; a world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone. — Naguib Mahfouz