Paint Yourself Quotes & Sayings

Have you ever hung a piece of black velvet behind you and looked at yourself in the mirror? We are each of us quite alone, and that's what I try to paint. — Thomas S. Buechner

A boy needs some territory to call his own. Does he get to choose what he wears - often? Does he have certain special toys that he does not have to let others play with? Is his room, especially, a little kingdom over which he has some say? Of course, a parent expects him to clean his room. I'm talking about choices of what color to paint it, what pictures he gets to hang on the walls. Do his parents and siblings have to knock before they enter? You might want to ask yourself, "The things that were precious to me when I was young - did I have any sort of control over them?" How else will he learn to rule? — John Eldredge

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? ... You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin's robe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. — Maggie Nelson

Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don't care what you'll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself. — Albert Camus

For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them. You make other men think, not "what does he look like?" but "what do I look like? — Hilary Mantel

We can not paint that in a more positive way if it is already negative, we have to take it that way and think of other means for reaching there. — Auliq Ice

We wanted to blast the world free of history.... picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night. — Chuck Palahniuk

You are so full of light," I say after a moment. "You align with joy, and I with fear and fury. If you could see into my thoughts, you would surely turn away. So why would you stay with me, even if return to Kenettra and resume our lives?"

"You paint me as a saint," he murmurs. "But I aligned with greed solely to prevent that."

Even now, he can make my lips twitch with a smile. "I'm serious, Magiano."

"As am I. None of us are saints. I have seen your darkness, yes, and know your struggle. I won't deny it." He touches my chin with one hand. At this gesture, the whispers seem to settle, pushed away where I can't hear them. "But you are also passionate and ambitious and loyal. You are a thousand things, mi Adelinetta, not just one. Do not reduce yourself to that. — Marie Lu

What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch ... And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself. — Pablo Picasso

Keep evolving. Keep reading plays, doing plays, but also be sure to expand your horizons as much as possible. You only have yourself to bring to your work. You are your palette, so give yourself as many colors as possible to paint with. — Gideon Glick

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time. — Anna Quindlen

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is. — Mark Vonnegut

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. — Robert M. Pirsig

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like. — Karen Marie Moning

When a seed sprouts, it's a violent process. The skin breaks and splits in two. Something dies and something is born. Anytime you paint a strong or violent image, you may be expressing that part of yourself that's opening in order to let the new emerge. — Michele Cassou

Painting is the act of discovery and you're constantly enlarging your horizon or finding yourself every time you paint. — Romare Bearden

I found that gloss paint suited me entirely, and its qualities still intrigue me. It's viscous and fluid and feels like a pool. It's highly reflective, which means there are layers of looking. You look at the picture, and you look at the surface, then you look at the reflection in the surface behind you, then you look at yourself. — Gary Hume

Store good words in your heart, and you will be always and everywhere finding yourself to be in goodness. Loyalty and kindness will always be with you. Paint your good words in the blue canvas of day, and in the starry canvas of night. In this way, you will always be with reminding yourself of goodness. Place your trust in the beauty of your words. Grow and culture in your understanding of beauty and love. The path of beauty and love always welcomes you to come walk it. — Richard Mc Sweeney

But while mastering technique is difficult and time-consuming, it's still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal - a "right answer" - than to give form to a new idea. It's easier to paint in the angel's feet to another's master-work than to discover where the angels live within yourself. — David Bayles

You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me? — Margaret Atwood

Look at the people who you surround yourself with. Who your friends are and who they are because they are a reflection of you. Your experiences in life define who you are, and everything else that makes you, you; shapes you into the person you are meant to be. Self discovery can last a lifetime because we are continually growing and changing as human beings. You are the person you've become today for a reason. So, ask yourself why. What brought you to the person you are now? Paint yourself a picture of who you once were, and who you now are to see how much you've changed, and, maybe, you'll discover something valuable to who you truly are. — Auliq Ice

I desecrated my own house?" Chance snorted in disbelief. "Then swam out to Fort Sumter and played paint-by-numbers on the walls, all to make Benjamin Blue like me? Don't flatter yourself, kid."
Ben's eyes cut like diamonds. "You act like such a big shot. But you don't fool me. Do you have any friends, Chance? Is there a single person who cares where you are right now?"
"Ben!" I blurted, horrified. "That's not - "
"You're one to talk." Chance stepped closer to Ben and matched him glare for glare. "I've never betrayed my friends. Not like you, eh, Benjamin?"
Ben's whole body went still. "What did you say?"
"Guys, guys!" Hi half rose, palms up. "There's no need for anyone to get upset. I've got Go-Gurt in the mini-fridge. I know when I get hungry, my manners can - "
"Shut up, Hi." Ben and Chance, in unison. — Kathy Reichs

When you're doing something like body paint or a nude shoot, you're making yourself very vulnerable, and you're really trusting people to really take care of you and make sure everything is very professional. — Ronda Rousey

I'm working hard to have a good life.
You don't need fancy things to feel good.
You can hug a puppy.
You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color.
You can plant a flower and watch it grow.
You can decide to trust people, the right people.
You can decide to start over and let other people start over, too. — Joan Bauer

Help people to meditate, because there is nothing more creative than meditation. Each art and each creativity can be tremendously enhanced by meditation. If somebody is a painter and he starts meditating, his painting will have a sudden jump, it will become tremendously profound - because whatsoever you paint reflects your mind. If the mind goes deeper, your painting will go deeper. You paint your mind. What else can you paint? You paint yourself. — Rajneesh

Education, especially business education will only give you tools. What you do with these tools is all that matters. Life and business isn't paint by numbers. You have to think for yourself. You have to invent yourself. You have an inferred fiduciary mandate to yourself, and that means, it's your responsibility to learn people skills, and language skills, in order to increase your chances of success. You also have to be at the right place, at the right time, with the right thing. Mostly and invariably, the real product you're going to be selling is ... .you. — Gene Simmons

Come into my lap and sit in the center of your soul. Drink the living waters of memory and give birth to yourself. What you unearth with stun you. You will paint the walls of this cave in thanksgiving. — Meinrad Craighead

When you sit down to paint or draw, you form yourself into a posture of praise — Robert Genn

To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, 'I'd like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?' — Larry Ellison

People can go on telling themselves things like "Think before you speak!" or "You don't believe that yourself" or "Forget it!" But they can also say, "Oh, what lovely flowers!" or "Are you a phone freak or something?" or "Suit yourself," or "This record makes me feel so happy!' Wonderful! Words are delightful little gifts we exchange like the Easter eggs we paint and hide for others to find and enjoy. I'd forgotten that, but you reminded me of it. — Thomas Brussig

A Queen is many things, but alone is never one of them." She
held the brush, poised right above the canvas as if she meant to paint,
but she didn't. "I don't need love or a man to complete me, and
someday, you'll find that's true for yourself. Suitors will come and go,
but you will remain. — Amanda Hocking

I mean most women just want to be good at something, they've got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not. They can't ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn't seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds. — John Fowles

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art ... — Milton Resnick

Ask yourself this question: Of this had been a white child found dead in a black neighborhood, would they be knocking on every door? 'Yes, sir.' Searching high and low? 'Yes, indeed.' It this had been a white child, would they paint him as a sinner and not a saint? 'Lord, no... — Ravi Howard

The tools are real. The viewer is real, you, the artist, is real and a part of everything you paint. You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you. All you have to do it with is a brush, some chemical and canvas, and technique. — Steven Brust

But what I can do is paint you a picture of what you'll never see when you're with a guy who's really into you: You'll never see you staring maniacally at your phone, willing it to ring. You'll never see you ruining an evening with friends because you're calling for your messages every fifteen seconds. You'll never see you hating yourself for calling him when you know you shouldn't have. What you will see is you being treated so well that no phone antics will be necessary. You'll be too busy being adored. — Greg Behrendt

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order. — Robert Henri

To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. — Philip Guston

You've got to live right, too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together ... The real cycle you're working in is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Qaulity or fall away from Qaulity together. — Robert M. Pirsig

The key to faking deaths is a fine appreciation of arterial spray patterns. I have found that blood bags work very well at simulating spray with a strategically poked hole; apply pressure to the bottom of the bag, practice a bit, and before long you will be able to write stories of carnage and odes to gore.
A small fan brush-the sort that one dude used to paint happy little trees-can paint a picture of blunt force spatters if you flick the surface properly. You could even talk to yourself, as that painter did, while you flick blood around: And maybe over here we have a nice stab wound. And, I don't know, maybe there's a few more back over here. Multiple stab wounds. It doesn't matter, whatever you feel like. — Kevin Hearne

Let's be honest. You let yourself be pulled in because it felt good to be wanted, needed. But then it went too far, as projected images always do. If it's not a real image, but one that has been projected on to you, then you can keep up the masquerade for only so long before the mask cracks and the paint on the mask peels away. — Tori Amos

Maybe they were onto something in Six. Drug yourself out and paint flowers on your body. Not such a bad life. Seemed happier than the rest of us, anyway. — Suzanne Collins

You should wear what you want to wear and not worry about trying to paint yourself in a certain image because that self-awareness is what's going to help you become a more independent and more interesting and healthier adult. — Alexandra Robbins

You want to paint? First of all you must cut off your tongue because your decision takes away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush. — Henri Matisse

I hate bumper stickers, you can't sum anything up. All you do is paint yourself in some caricaturist corner. — David Cross

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command. — Mark Rothko

Before you choose whom to love, take a look at yourself, choose your own word, think about how and reassess your time when you have given life to love, Know your ready or not and make sure you are not there to hurt making regrets on your door and paint the word I wish on your window. — Auliq Ice

Bullshit. You can paint with a fork, you can kill with a fork. A fork is a tool. Don't let yourself be confined by the definitions of others. — Brian Fatah Steele

If you can't paint yourself honestly, everything else you paint will be a lie too."

- Diego — Shaun David Hutchinson

Drug yourself out and paint flowers on your body. Not such a bad life. — Suzanne Collins

An artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think. — E.A. Bucchianeri

True ambition is trying to paint yourself out of a corner — Josh Stern

Having children takes the focus off yourself, which I'm really grateful for. I'm so tired of thinking about myself. I'm sick of myself. You feel you want to be there and not miss out on anything. It's a true joy and a very profound love. You can write a book, you can make a movie, you can paint a painting, but having kids is the most extraordinary thing I've ever taken on. — Brad Pitt

In the end, it doesn't really matter what you paint. It's all just a routine to connect yourself finally with other people. — Chris Ofili

I paint by all the daylight we have and that is little enough, less perhaps than you have by much ... imagine to yourself how a purl must look through a burnt glass. — John Constable

Love is like paint - you can't spread even a little without getting
some on yourself. — Wayne L. Misner

I'm compelled to paint nearly every day. I just felt like making a painting, went out and bought paints and a canvas. Now it fulfills me creatively when I'm not doing music: it's something you can do by yourself and it's totally yours. It's a great adjunct to my life. — David Johansen

She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. — Nicole Krauss

If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you're good enough. Just do it. Be generous. Offer a gift to the world that no one else can offer: yourself. — Glennon Doyle Melton

In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury. — Tom Robbins

People ask me why I don't paint oils. It takes too long. Cleaning brushes in linseed oil, and it takes six months to really dry, and all this. I don't have that kind of time. I work with acrylic. It's water based. You can clean it under water. If you spill it on yourself, you just throw it in the washing machine. — Grace Slick

If it's a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it's going to shine. It's going to resonate. You could look inside of yourself and you could have a canvas and you could paint a dot in it, but if that is where your creative purpose is taking you then it needs to be that dot. — Rainn Wilson

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time. — Otto Dix

Words are your paintbrush, and your life is the canvas. You can paint whatever you want to paint; you can even copy another artist's work - but what you express with your paintbrush is the way you see yourself, the way you see the entire reality. — Miguel Ruiz

Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. — Nicole Krauss

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it. — Keegan-Michael Key

Life is only as colorful as the paintbox you choose to paint it with. — Gillian Duce

All life is death. You don't fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive. ("The Chambered Fruit") — M. Rickert

If you paint in your mind a picture of bright and happy expectations, you put yourself into a condition conducive to your goal. — Norman Vincent Peale

Visualize the conversations your friends have about how they all knew you'd never be able to make it. Imagine having to explain quitting to every single person who knew you were going to BUD/S. You have to face them. You have to live with many of them. Imagine trying to find a way to overcome the shame of failing. How long is it going to take for them to stop thinking of you as a failure, a quitter, a pussy? How long until anyone takes anything you say seriously again? Visualize being sent to a crappy ship, an undesignated Seaman. Imagine, if you will, a life below deck where you spend 18 hours chipping paint and repainting the spot you chipped. Imagine not seeing the sun for days or weeks at a time. This picture is worse than anything in BUD/S. Experience the shame and humiliation of quitting once in your head. Feel how much you hate yourself for giving up on your dream. Then never, ever, ever experience it in real life. — Mark Owens

What good is it being a painter if you can't paint yourself? — Gregory Maguire

These days any planned thing looked good to me. What heaven to have your work cut out for you, to be part of the Big Picture
a picture you did not have to paint yourself. — Laurie Colwin

Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you ... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work. — Eugene Delacroix

You don't need fancy things to feel good. You can hug a puppy. You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color. You can plant a flower and watch it grow. You can decide to trust people - the right people. You can decide to start over and let other people start over too -Sugar Mae Cole — Joan Bauer

The reason why human beings fail to create real connections with others, is due to the fact that they are not first real within themselves. If you want your connection with another to be real, then you must first make sure that you are real in yourself, thus giving the other person a genuine ground to anchor into. People colour themselves different shades that do not match their own, and then they are surprised why they fail to create lasting relationships with other people! You must be the shade that you are, because the shades that you paint on will all wash off eventually, anyway. Be the shade that you are, and attract the people that like the real hue of you. — C. JoyBell C.

Love is an art, Berk. Just like painting or music. Some painters draw mere lines, scratches on the canvas and call them art; some paint stars studded skies like van Gogh; or Chopin's music conquers the hearts of millions while the execrable disco music blaring out of the open windows of a car have also their audience. Some describe love in high-flown flowery language and you identify yourself with the hero and the heroine and feel yourself in the seventh heaven while some give such a lamentable picture of it that you almost curse it! — T. Afsin Ilgar

As if reading his mind, Lily huffed. "You're as predictable as the spring rains, son of mine, and as boring as drying paint. Unless there's an emergency, you're home every night by seven, you eat dinner by yourself, go for a run, watch exactly one hour of TV by yourself, and go to bed at ten o'clock. If God ever loses his watch, he only has to look at Lance Beaufort to get back on schedule."
...
"I've been having trouble with my phone," he tried.
Lily took two strides to the desk, leaned over it with both hands braced on the surface, and stared.
"Okay, yes! I have been over there. But it's for work. And ... and it's work related!"
"Oh? Explain that to me, because I thought you were the sheriff, not in training for a role in Lassie. — Eli Easton

Look from the blind man's eye ... You can paint the picture, the way you like about this world, so why not think positive and make this world more beautiful for yourself and others? — Fawad Afzal Khan

In case you still haven't figured it out, he loves you. Your tiger will be back in the morning, and you can thank me anytime. Now, do I have to paint another picture for you, or do you think you can take it from here by yourself without screwing up? — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

They want a woman who is a canvas, white and empty. Standing still, existing for no other purpose than to serve as a mute object onto which they can paint their own hopes and desires. They want their brides veiled. They want a demure, blank space they can fill with whatever they desire."
"Miss Lowell, you magnificent creature, I want you to paint your own canvas. I want you to unveil yourself. — Courtney Milan

That brought the smile back to the old woman's face. "This one at least is honest," she announced, "but you, ser ... I have known a dozen Westerosi knights and a thousand adventurers of the same ilk, but none so pure as you would paint yourself. Men are beasts, selfish and brutal. However gentle the words, there are always darker motives underneath. I do not trust you, ser. — George R R Martin

Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style, park your own car out front. — Karen Marie Moning

Manet wanted one day to paint my wife and children. Renoir was there. He took a canvas and began painting them, too. After a while, Manet took me aside and whispered, 'You're on very good terms with Renoir and take an interest in his future - do advise him to give up painting! You can see for yourself that it's not his metier at all. — Claude Monet

Never embarrass a student in front of others. Embarrass yourself often to relieve the tension, but do not paint them into a corner. — Harry Gilbert

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!"
" But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity ... — Kenzaburo Oe