World Is Your Canvas Quotes & Sayings

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. — Virginia Woolf

The world is rather shot to pieces (end of World War II), 1945), but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another or sucking each other's blood. The entertaining folly of war evaporates, distinguished boredom sits down again on the dignified old overstuffed chairs ... May I report about myself that I have had a truly grotesque time, brim-full with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs, hunger, and again and again work - in spite of everything (using his bed sheets as canvas — Max Beckmann

I started when I was 15 years old. And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world, I was doing graffiti - writing my name everywhere, using the city as a canvas. I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends. Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure. — JR

Whether it's a pebble in a riverbed or a soaring mountain peak, I see everything in the world as the handiwork of the Lord. When I paint, I try to represent the beauty of God's creation in my art. Many modern painters see the world as a jumble of random lines and shapes with no divine beauty or order, and their works reflect their viewpoint. Because I see God's peacefulness, serenity, and contentment, I work to capture those feelings on the canvas. My vision of God defines my vision of the world. — Thomas Kinkade

Reading takes you places; it is all up to your imagination. The world (or in this case book) is your canvas, go paint it. — BOB

Do you remember the church across the sands? You stood outside and planned to travel the lands, where the pilgrims go. So you packed your world up inside a canvas sack, set off down the highway with your rings and Kerouac. Someone said they saw you in Nepal a long time back. Tell me why you look away, don't you have a word to say? — Al Stewart

Wonder too ... if the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, our own emptiness, might actually become places to see. — Ann Voskamp

The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love. — Mervyn Peake

In this world, this life, "flow" [the times when our work or play so absorbs and attunes our energies that we lose track of time] comes to an end. The canvas is dry, the fugue is complete, the band plays the tag one more time and then resolves on the final chord. And, too, the book is finished, the service is over, the lights go up in the darkened theater and we emerge blinking into the bright lights of the "real world." But what if the timeless, creative world we had glimpsed is really the real world -- and it is precisely its reality that gave it such power to captivate us for a while? What if our ultimate destiny is that moment of enjoyment and engagement we glimpse in the artist's studio? — Andy Crouch

I think something happens with age. And I find this really a lot in what I read from certain art critics: For people who are all about change-people who are supposed to be intellectually and culturally drawn to the idea of change and how the voice of a creative person affects the world on a bigger scale than just the canvas-I would expect a person in that position to have that open mind. It's only a sign of age that they become so locked in their own rules that they forget that this is what it's all about. — Marc Jacobs

As free and crazy as we want to be, and how much we want to make the world a canvas, there's also a part of us that doesn't want to make any mark. — Gerard Way

All of my works are steps on my journey, a struggle for truth that I have waged with pen, canvas, and materials. Overhead is a distant, radiant star, and the more I stretch to reach it, the further it recedes. But by the power of my spirit and my single-hearted pursuit of the path, I have clawed my way through the labyrinthine confusion of the world of people in an unstinting effort to approach even one step closer to the realm of the soul. — Yayoi Kusama

With a stroke of love on the canvas of my soul I'm painting a perfect world with shades of Michelangelo With each promise made in every heart that knows we can live in a perfect world in shades of Michelangelo I hear songs of children echo in the sky I hear songs of children a tomorrow so bright! — Belinda Carlisle

Today she feels she is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt. The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant. Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark. — Glenn Haybittle

Yahoo! has clearly established itself as the go-to destination for big events and breaking news, and we are focused on providing the best digital canvas for the world's greatest storytellers to create, develop and showcase their visions. — Ross Levinsohn

The world is but a canvas to our imagination — Henry David Thoreau

world was dripping down his eyeballs like wet oil paint down a canvas. — Eoin Colfer

Heaven speed the canvas, gallantly unfurl'd, To furnish and accommodate a world, To give the Pole the produce of the sun, And knit the unsocial climates into one. — William Cowper

Romance was different in her world. In our world. She believed it lived all around us. In the trees, the blue sky hiding behind rain clouds, snow flakes clinging to windshields, squirrels hiding their food, blades of grass catching drops from a misty morning, and in every person to walk the earth. Ella loved to sit on city benches and make up stories about passing strangers. Since meeting her my entire world changed. I always turned life into strands of color on an empty canvas. People blurred by like flashes of light. Just blurs. Then Ella walked into my life and everything slowed down. The blurs of color became people with stories. People with hearts. People. Like me. — Marilyn Grey

The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it. — Alice Neel

He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas baskets and it had sex, memories, cravings, names of old friends, principal rivers of the world. Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence. — Don DeLillo

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity. — Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Love is when unknowingly I am moving to a world of no return, Where my desire and your fragrance together burn
all your thoughts in canvas of my mind and soul
turns in to a masterpiece as my life's aim and goal
looks I am taken over and over away by you
showering in me as a rain of you and only you — Seema Gupta

The world is your canvas and your teacher.Take a day to reflect, measure and adjust on your goals; progress is essential to continued success. — Bob Proctor

And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle
all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe
for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient. — Neal Stephenson

Kissed me like he had all the time in the world. Slowly at first, just a brushing of his mouth against mine, and then deeper, parting my lips with his tongue. It wasn't just a kiss. Not when his tongue danced over mine or the way he tasted me. Reece turned kissing into an art form, and if I had to attach a color to it, to get it on canvas, it would be supple shades of reds and purples. — J. Lynn

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. — Stephen Shore

But Hannah's friend didn't understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn't understand Hannah's stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn't understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn't hurt, didn't cry, didn't spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah's best ideas - sometimes her only ideas - were buried beneath the skin. — Jake Vander Ark

Magick is an art; using reality and the world as its canvas. — Dacha Avelin

It is for that moment when I might steady you so you don't fall, I have added my blood to an inkwell. Indelible now will be my mark on history's canvas and upon any sincere debate of God where reason finally prevails. And when you have the strength, you too may find another to hold up. They lean against each other in a storm, those cypresses grown tall together ... through the years. If they had not trusted and protected one another the way they do, they would not have survived and given us their grace and shade - a place for our eyes to meet. Our friendship can be like this: a needed lift, a sail, a pillar, a springboard to taste the unfathomable. It is to tend you as you come into being, like a new world, that causes me to stay, gives me a purpose. Of course I thank you for that ... for letting me help. — Rumi

The thing for me is, what if one returns to these maxims, these rather simplistic maxims "Be the change you want to see in the world." Because what canvas have we but the self for these kind of explorations, ultimately. — Russell Brand

My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world. — Roy Lichtenstein

This is your world
You're the creator
Find freedom on this canvas
Believe, that you can do it,
'Cuz you can do it.
You can do it. — Bob Ross

There is some other form that you contain within yourself that is not will or purpose and, when applied to art, serves you best. If you systematically apply to the art that you create the aggression of the world that turned you towards art in the first place; if you, in turn, become the aggressor towards your canvas, the thing that you're doing; if you, in turn, work your will upon this thing that you want - you will then cause a dissatisfaction in this life that you create. — Milton Resnick

It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision. — Nelson Shanks

White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them. — Donna Tartt

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms "success" and "failure" had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one's place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things. — Paul Auster

'Hellraiser' is an amazing world that Clive Barker created, and it is such a beautifully vibrant and surreal world within which to work. It is also not an undaunting canvas. It is a canvas created by an artist. — Patrick Lussier

I have patches of insomnia, and I'm fascinated by the otherness of the world at night. The stillness. Daytime preoccupations fall away, standards change, thoughts change. It's a canvas for reinvention, I think. — Morag Joss

There was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush and making the first mark. — Virginia Woolf

The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change. — Jacob Bronowski

What could be more entrancing than a carefree nomadic existence camping, moving, exploring strange places and the ruins of forgotten empires, sleeping under canvas or the open sky, and giving no thought to the conventions and restriction of the modern world? — M.M. Kaye