Ephemeral Art Quotes & Sayings

Clyde Phillip Wachsberger's delightful memoir about tending beds of flowers as compensation for a lonely middle age only to find unexpected romance along the way is a sweet reminder that, as he puts it, 'anything can happen in a garden.' In prose that balances candor with perfect courtesy, he charms us with the message that keeping a garden with a beloved companion, this most ephemeral of all the arts, can bring us the most enduring joys and pleasures. — Philip Gambone

Eros and Thanatos were always the source of his inspiration, even though, from this time on, they usually appear in the guise of two simple and fundamental themes: flowers and women. These themes offered him the greatest opportunity to give a certain permanence to all that can be grasped in passing: an ephemeral sensual joy, the ecstasy of life. — Gilles Neret

The problem with our art form: it's so ephemeral, and catching performances can be so difficult ... the important thing is what happens at the moment of performance, for the people who made the effort to be there: it lives with them. — Judith Weir

Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living. — Nancy Mitford

The spoken word is ephemeral. The written word, eternal. A symphony, timeless. — A.E. Samaan

A false image is, of course, a work of art, an idol. And a lie. A narcissist identifies with this image, not his true inner self. So, all he cares about is his image, not what kind of person he really is. Indeed, the latter has no real existence in his world.

In identifying with his image, he's identifying with an ephemeral figment that has but virtual reality, a purely immanent existence as a reflection in the attention shone on him by others. No attention, no image. No image, no self! — Kathy Krajco

There are worse things than suffering and death ... it is worse to lose one's self-respect. — Sandor Marai

As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image. — Craig Owens

But art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art - the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few — Laird Barron

The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos - all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs. — Bertrand Russell

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast. — Peter Cooper

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral ... — Jorge Luis Borges

Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair. — Karl Lagerfeld

Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months! It is quite clear that were it beautiful and rational we would not alter anything that combined those two rare qualities. And wherever dress has been so, it has remained unchanged in law and principle for many hundred years. — Oscar Wilde

If you never see a fool
You'll always be happy.
The one who keeps company with fools
Will be sorry for a long time.
It's painful to live with fools,
Like being always with an enemy. — Anonymous

Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private. — Andy Goldsworthy

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that. — Brian Eno

Public art is ephemeral by nature. Google 's new project not only catalogs an artist's work but archives it and allows people to see the art long after it has disappeared. — Shepard Fairey

A sculpture of the magnificent shape of God. Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of That Which Cannot Be Named; but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. — Laird Barron

The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic. — Edward St. Aubyn

Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral. — Stefan Zweig

The English novelist J. B. Priestley once said that if he were an American, he would make the final test of whatever men chose to do in art, business, or politics a comparison with the Grand Canyon. He believed that whatever was false and ephemeral would be exposed for what it was when set against that mass of geology and light. Priestley was British, but he had placed his finger on an abiding American truth: the notion that the canyon stands as one of our most important touchstones - a kind of roofless tabernacle whose significance is both natural and national. It is our cathedral in the desert, and the word our is key because although the canyon belongs to the entire world, we, as Americans, belong particularly to it. — Kevin Fedarko

It's everything for me. Without figure skating, I am nothing. — Evgeni Plushenko

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure. — Eudora Welty

Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

The extraordinary craving for someone faithful and devoted, which unaccountably and suddenly came over him. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The miracle of Bach has not appeared in any other art. To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervour, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine; such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time. — Pablo Casals

Those wire baskets where you leave your paperwork to die ... — Jordan Castillo Price

I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible. — Tim Ferriss