Quotes & Sayings About Painting Your Life

Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowd
As herds of bellowing buses drive by
Love's anguish tightens your throat
As if you were never to be loved again
If you lived in the old days you would enter a monastery
You are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayer
You make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter crackles
The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your life
It's a painting hanging in a dark museum
And sometimes you go and look at it close up — Guillaume Apollinaire

If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead. — Benjamin Wood

Life's kind of like a painting. A really bizarre, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is just a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. The painting could be of the sea, the sky, people,buildings, a butterfly on a flower, or anything except the blur you were once convinced it was. — Cecelia Ahern

I think bridges have a special meaning in our life. I think a book is a bridge. Any type of art is a bridge that allows different cultures to connect. You may not understand your neighbour's way of seeing life, but you sure understand your neighbour's joy in painting or dancing. — Paulo Coelho

If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement. — Ben Shahn

There was this interesting quote: try and live your life without fear and desire. It's this concept that's like when you look at a painting in a museum and you are held in aesthetic arrest. So the I, the ego, is stripped, is gone. The observer and thing become one. That's where fear and desire come in because you don't want to own it, possess it, desire it, and it's not moving you to fear. It's like you're in this harmonious state with the object. — Zack Snyder

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life. — David McCullough

You told me a love story. I honestly believe your parents wanted the best for you, but their love almost destroyed your life. If Our Lady, as she appeared in my grandmother's painting, was treading on a snake, that indicates that love has two faces. — Paulo Coelho

If you have a painting in you, paint. If you have a song to sing, sing. Don't judge your creation. Just create it. Banish doubt and fear and step out of your own way if you have to. Write if you're a writer and invent if you're an inventor. Do what you were born to do. Only then will you know a remarkable life. — Toni Sorenson

But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child. — Donald Miller

THE JOURNEY

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving.
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving. — David Whyte

If you have used colour throughout most of your artistic life, try just black and white ... it will take your painting to another dimension where tone and form in all its permutations reign supreme. — David Luiz

When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. — Osho

Punk rock and skateboarding took the 'school' out of living your life, and I related to learning as I went, doing a lot of different things that I liked, when I liked. Consequently, I'm mediocre at all of the above, but still stoked on being a lifetime student of music, skating, painting, writing, etc. — Jeff Ament

Everything's a painting, anyway," Fawn said. "That's what I think. We live inside a giant painting, only we can't see who's holding the paintbrush. Any time something strange happens in your life it's because the painter added a new brushstroke you can't see. The big picture keeps changing, but we're stuck in the small one. — Rose Christo

Your choices, your words, and every move you make are permanent. Life is lived in indelible ink, boy. Wake up. You're making little bitty brushstrokes every minute you walk around on this earth. And with those tiny brushstrokes, you are creating the painting that your life will ultimately become - a masterpiece or a disaster. — Andy Andrews

Now you stride alone through the Paris crowds
Busses in bellowing herds roll by
Anguish clutches your throat
As if you would never again be loved
In the old days you would have turned monk
With shame you catch yourself praying
And jeer your laughter crackles like hellfire
Its sparks gild the depths of your life
Which like a painting in a dark museum
You approach sometimes to peer at closely — Guillame Apollinaire

Christians belive in a sovereign God who never says "Oops". We believe that all our days ... are divine strokes on the canvas of our lives by the Master Artist who certified his skill, his power, and his love in the Masterpiece of Calvary. If you doubt His skill in painting your life - look at the Calvary — John Piper

If you can really accept the fact that every time you think a thought and every time you speak a word you are literally painting your future or making your dinner - whatever you want to call it - you are creating ... and you are creating your own life. — Louise Hay

Entertain only those thoughts which bring health, vitality and happiness in your life. Start now and think right for you are the painter of the canvas of your life. — Sanchita Pandey

I made a painting that has holes in it. Why is there holes? Because God says to us, I cannot do all. I can create you, but I cannot do it all. You have to help Me fix the holes and put everything together. This is the learning from the Holocaust. That each of us is here to fix the holes.
I don't know how much you know about the Holocaust. What is your interest in it? What do you want to do with your life, where do you want to go? What is hurting in you? What are your holes to fix? What is now important in my life, and in your life also, is that after the Holocaust, we are shaking hands with each other, that we are nobody lesser than the other. That we understand the real meaning of what God created us for. You have the task. You have the task to better this world. There are holes in people also but those we create and can fix with love. God wants us whole. — Alice Lok Cahana

Never look back. The past is done. The future is a blank canvas. Work on creating a masterpiece. Only you have the power to make your painting beautiful. — Suzy Kassem

Imagine your life is a big canvas. Picture it in your mind and think about the beginnning of your painting of life.You're fourteen yours old, and you are lucky if you have one seventh painted. Now imagine the rest of the canvas is totaly empty. Every day you live, and every month and every year, means another inch that is painted on that canvas. You're going to be painting this empty canvas with your life and when you get to the end of it, what is that painting going to look like? — Stephen Biro

You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home. Herein lies the poet's true calling, the artist's vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to all practitioners of the arts, for they mellow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.

Yes, a poem, a painting, can draw the sting of troubles from a troubled world and lay in its place a blessed realm before our grateful eyes. — Soseki Natsume

Your art is part of the big painting of your life. You are on your own, standing by yourself in the middle of creation. In the beauty of that aloneness, and in how you respond to it, you will find your passion. — Michele Cassou

What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting ... I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused. — Anais Nin

God Is The Artist Of Your Landscape

Will things always work out in the way you hope and want? Of course not! You are not the illustrator of your life painting. God has all the hues and brush strokes worked out. The painting He is creating, thanks to the struggle He has given you, is a masterpiece. — Cheryl Zelenka

Sometimes a game comes at just the right moment in your life. 'Flower' is beautiful, serene, and a bit of sunshine in a gloomy world. I remember going through a rough spot in my life and turning on 'Flower' for a little break in the day. You fly through luscious landscapes collecting petals and painting the world with life. — Rob Manuel

The painter folded back the heavy curtain, standing in the stream of light breaking through the damp thickness of the room. He paused, still holding the drape in his hand as he considered with suspicion that a world could exist outside the window. — Thomas Lloyd Qualls

Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim. — John Ruskin

If your life is full, you will paint full pictures. If it is empty, your pictures will be empty too. — Harvey Dunn

You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way ... you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing. — Edie Sedgwick

I am grateful to you for the rest of my life. And when I say "you," I mean every part of you, including your mind and your smile and your giggle and the mad look you get in your eyes sometimes. If you don't believe that your words have got into my soul, take a look at the painting which I took to the art show (it's called The Puppy and the Pyramid, which is what you might call a clue). But if I don't get to kiss you fairly soon, Lyd, I won't have a soul left to speak of. — Jaclyn Moriarty

Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful. — Don Roff

How better to experience the hours of darkness than at the back of your boat with a cup of tea in hand as she forges through the water, painting excited light on to the inky black as phosphorescence bursts into life at the bow and slowly fades its farewell in the wake? The deck is like a reflection of the stars in the sky as the phosphorescence glows in its random resting places. I feel so alive when I am out there with an unblemished horizon and the musical rush of water passing the hull. The — Pete Goss

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting. — Charlotte Rampling

Let's say that you could carry around a perfect copy of a three-dimensional realization of a Caravaggio painting (or if your tastes are more modern make it a Picasso). You would carry a small box in your pocket, and whenever you wanted, you could press a button and the box would open up into life-sized glory and show you the picture. You would bring it to all the parties you attended. The peak of the culture of the seventeenth century (or say the 1920s if you prefer Picasso) would be at your disposal. Alternatively, let's say you could carry around in your pocket an iPhone. That gives you thousands of songs, a cell phone, access to personal photographs, YouTube, email, and web access, among many other services, not to mention all the applications that have not yet been written. You will have a strong connection to the contemporary culture of small bits. — Tyler Cowen

The real you is still a little child who never grew up. Sometimes that little child comes out when you are having fun or playing, when you feel happy, when you are painting, or writing poetry, or playing the piano, or expressing yourself in some way. These are the happiest moments of your life - when the real you comes out, when you don't care about the past and you don't worry about the future. You are childlike. — Miguel Ruiz

The point of the resurrection ... is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die ... What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it ... What you do in the present - by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself - will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it ... ). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom. — N. T. Wright

When you consider what you would love to accomplish in your life but feel ill-prepared to bring it about, picture the eighty-nine Michelangelo living five centuries ago, painting, sculpting, and writing. Imagine he is telling you that you can create whatever you desire, and the great danger is not in having too much hope, but in reaching what you have perceived as hopeless. — Wayne Dyer

But painting houses wasn't unsatisfying work. You had your good karma jobs, your decent clients. It felt pretty good when you drove away on that last day, paid in full, having restored a little color to someone's shit-brown life. — Wally Lamb

Be Willing to Pay the Price If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all. MICHELANGELO Renaissance sculptor and painter who spent 4 years lying on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Behind every great achievement is a story of education, training, practice, discipline, and sacrifice. You have to be willing to pay the price. Maybe that price is pursuing one single activity while putting everything else in your life on hold. Maybe it's investing all of your own personal wealth or savings. Maybe it's the willingness to walk away from the safety of your current situation. But though many things are typically required to reach a successful outcome, the willingness to do what's required adds that extra dimension to the mix that helps you persevere in the face of overwhelming challenges, setbacks, pain, and even personal — Jack Canfield

ROTHKO: (Explodes) 'Pretty.' 'Beautiful.' 'Nice.' 'Fine.' That's our life now! Everything's 'fine'. We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone's laughing all the time, it's all so goddamn funny, it's our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn't it? We're a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of 'fine.' How are you? Fine.. How was your day? Fine. How are you feeling? Fine. How did you like the painting? Fine. What some dinner? Fine ... Well, let me tell you, everything is not fine!!
HOW ARE YOU?! ... HOW WAS YOUR DAY?! ... HOW ARE YOU FEELING? Conflicted. Nuanced. Troubled. Diseased. Doomed. I am not fine. We are not fine. We are anything but fine. — John Logan

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious. — E. E. Cummings

... * to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment ... — Sylvia Plath

Fame never interested me. I could have exhibited more of my own works in the 1970s, but I didn't want to. It's sort of like being a child. When you're finished with school, you have only one thing on your mind: to get out and experience life. Did I want to spend all my time working on a painting? No, I wanted to have fun, travel, meet women and live life. — Wolfgang Beltracchi

There are moments when clear images finally begin to emerge within the abstract painting of your life. — Renee Carlino

Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for? — Camille Pissarro

Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spent your free time finger painting or playing shuffeboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze. — Marisha Pessl

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives ... .
You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

To paint one must forget everything else. Where you live, who you know, what you eat, when to sleep. The landscape of the canvas becomes your only reality. The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command. — Thomas Lloyd Qualls

There is an exercise I teach at colleges: Get yourself a canvas and a bunch of acrylics and go into a very dimly lighted room. Dip a brush into one of the colors, slap it on the canvas, don't look, close your eyes, make a painting, don't look, turn the lights on and see what you've got. I think this releases people from the editor in their life that's always standing over their shoulder saying, "Oh, you don't have any talent; who do you think you are?" — Buffy Sainte-Marie

I suppose what you're doing as a painter is making a record of your trip through life. I can't think of any job that is quite as satisfactory as doing a painting. — Robert Genn

Now I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, 'Painting is a blind man's profession' and 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing'. And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction, we take in every lesson we find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw. — Jandy Nelson

What happens if your choice is misguided?' I ask, softly.
Miss Moore takes a pear from the bowl and offers us the grapes to devour. 'You must try to correct it.'
'But what if it's too late? What if you can't?'
There's a sad sympathy in Miss Moore's catlike eyes as she regards my painting again. She paints the thinnest sliver of shadow along the bottom of the apple, bringing it fully to life.
'Then you must find a way to live with it. — Libba Bray

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls. — Zadie Smith

This is the way life goes in Big Sur. Waiting for the mail, watching the sea-lions in the surf or the freighters on the horizon, sitting in the tubs at Hot Springs, once in a while a bit of drink - and, most of the time, working at what ever it is that you came here to work on, whether it be painting, writing, gardening or the simple art of living your own life. — Hunter S. Thompson

I never consciously said, 'I want to be an actor.' It sounds stupid, but it's kind of like being a painter or something. You don't say, 'From today on I'm going to be a painter.' It's not something conscious - you've just been painting pictures all your life. — Franka Potente

Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you've been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you're having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull off the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted. -Cold Tangerines — Shauna Niequist

Success is not fame or money or the power to bewitch. it is to have created something valuable from your own individuality and skill a garden, an embroidery, a painting, a cake, a life. — Charlotte Gray

Life is like a painting you reflect the image based on your feeling, emotion, character, attitude and how you made it. — Daniel Habil

June Afternoon"

Didn't I tell you everything is possible in this deja vu?
Try the river boat, the carousel, feed the pigeons, Bar-B-Q.
Look at all the people, happy faces all around.
Smiling, throwing kisses, busy making lazy sounds

It's a bright June afternoon, it never gets dark.
Wah-wah! Here comes the sun.
Get your green, green tambourine, let's play in the park.
Wah-wah! Here comes the sun

Some folks are on blankets, slowly daydreaming
and reaching for their food.
Let's go buy an ice-cream and a magazine with an attitude
and put on a cassette, we can pretend that you're a star
cos life's so very simple just like la-la-la

It's a bright June afternoon...

There's a painter painting his masterpiece.
There are some squirrels jumping in the trees,
There's a wide-eyed boy with a red balloon.
All my life I've longed for this afternoon. — Roxette

Painting is almost like a religious experience, which should go on and on. Age just gives you the freedom to do some things you've never done before. Great work can come at any stage of your life. — Will Barnet

We're painting the same people all our life - it's just the way we look at them that changes. If you experience trauma, you can speak about it in so many different ways. You can speak about landscape, you can speak about your food; it's always different. Trauma is the beginning of life as an artist. — Christian Boltanski