Grave Art Quotes & Sayings

One of the popular songs in Tyler's rebellion was the familiar couplet: "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" Shakespeare refers to it in "Hamlet," where the grave-diggers speak as follows: "First Clown. Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentleman but gardners, ditchers and grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession. Second Clown. Was he a gentleman? First Clown. He was the first that ever bore arms. Second Clown. Why, he had none. First Clown. What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says, Adam digged; could he dig without arms?" (Act 5, — William Shakespeare

Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things ... " she held up four big-knuckled fingers. " ... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these things are as nothing ... " She closed her fingers into a fist. " ... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition! — Frank Herbert

The closer art reflects reality, the less artistic it becomes. Art is most enticing when it mimics life as a wolf dressed in sheep's clothing. The contrary is always a grave disappointment. — Anthony Marais

Words of a man were meaningless. But actions spoke volumes, and it was always through deeds that the true measure of a man could be ascertained. — Maya Banks

We are breathing at the same pace, our chests rising and falling in unison. We have no need to whisper, because at this distance, all we need is thought. — David Levithan

Scion of chiefs and monarchs, where art thou? Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead? Could not the grave forget thee, and lay low Some less majestic, less beloved head? — Lord Byron

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts. — Brendan Gill

I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss! — Victor Hugo

Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God
imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant
and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? — Richard Dawkins

I heard some famous people had an anniversary, five long years together, it was Hollywood history. Now my grandma and grandpa never made no printed page, but they took the love of 57 years right to the grave. — Clay Walker

[I] put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No! — John Stuart Mill

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave. — John Keats

Sure, I can talk like you, but I choose not to, It's like an art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he could paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on the side of a face ... See if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist ... You can take that to the grave and dig it up when you need it. — Neal Shusterman

There is a simple test to define path dependence of beliefs (economists have a manifestation of it called the endowment effect). Say you own a painting you bought for $20,000, and owing to rosy conditions in the art market, it is now worth $40,000. If you owned no painting, would you still acquire it at the current price? If you would not, then you are said to be married to your position. There is no rational reason to keep a painting you would not buy at its current market rate - only an emotional investment. Many people get married to their ideas all the way to the grave. Beliefs are said to be path dependent if the sequence of ideas is such that the first one dominates. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

At night all cats are grey. — George Orwell

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame ... — Henry Adams

Every artist takes their final work to the grave. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete - the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art - throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano at the Bertolini, and "Too much Schumann" was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned. — E. M. Forster

Now you're selling out, the devil sold a dream and you bought it without thinking about. How the beast will decrease the brain wave, with material thoughts from the crib to the grave. — Kool Moe Dee

Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with:
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing ...
Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He. — Saadat Hasan Manto

Only art can make the future love you, and that is what art is about: attraction at a distance, seduction from the past, inveiglement from beyond the grave. Art is a plea to love me when I'm gone. And yet, I thought to myself, who could love what I do? Who could possibly love me for this? — Supervert

Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which no mind can calculate. depend upon books. — Bill Vaughan

Coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes. — David Mermin

I can never understand why people seem to think that growing up with unhappy parents is better than growing up with a happy single parent. — Sarah Morgan

Heart as collapsed time, as a dug-up grave, as simple machine. Heart as big black bugs bleed blue blood. Heart as MI frozen as seen from airplane, everything still and white and beautiful. Heart as the Day the Music Died. Heart as love being made, as fucking, as a pleasantly haunted house. Heart as a dim memory of a dark room in which you're molded wetasscracked into a beanbag chair, fumbling for wetness. Come hither. Heart as a cunt's supposed to smell like tuna. Heart as the star of the sea. Heart as a pussy in permanent bloom. Heart as doxycycline. Heart as waxwings, as a fudge round, as the phone rings once and then stops. Heart as throw your hands in the air, throw your art at the stars, stutter and stare. Heart as a Stratocaster. Heart as Twin Reverb. Heart as I heart you so much. Heart as all that we thought we knew in the world disappears into vapor. Heart as the rest of your life times the weight of the world squared. — Bryan Charles

Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject. — C.S. Lewis

Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight ... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty. — Stephanie Mills

Man I'm high off life. Fuck it, I'm WASTED — Jay-Z

The upward thrust of evolution as part of the design becomes something to preserve and revere. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

Motto is Happiness is a #Hashtag and we live life knowing the fairy tale is possible, even if you only get it online. — J.A. Huss

Now I stand on the knoll before the grave of Jacob Kahn, the cypress tall against the blue morning sky and the wind warm on my face. It is the only sense left me, I hear him say. There are colors in the wind, Asher Lev. Find your demons again and return to your work. Colors wait for you in the wind. Things were too comfortable for you. An artist needs a broken world in order to have pieces to shape into art. Isn't that right, Asher Lev? Comfort is death to art. Asher Lev, artist. Asher Lev, troubler. Asher Lev, my future. His voice weaves through the wind, and I add to it the words of the psalmist, " 'Protect me, O God, for I seek refuge in You. I say to the Lord, Your are my benefactor; there is no one above You ... ' " The wind is red and black in the trembling cypress. — Chaim Potok

The life of a vampire begins with the first bite. — A. J. Gallant

Everybody knows how awful the world is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things, others with sports, money, love, art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way. — Woody Allen

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste. — Philip Larkin

He who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter. — Marianne Moore

Art is long, and time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them - who first had the idea of making a reasonable facsimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop? But that will have to wait. — Margaret Atwood

For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition. — George Steiner