J. D. Salinger Quotes

Artists have a sensibility that others don't have. They have a way of reading into the future.

The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.

Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

Every intelligent person, whether he's an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

I'm an artist, therefore I think I am sensitive to human pain.

It's very strange: if you're a philosopher or musician or an artist, people automatically believe you can see the future. Even if they don't like you, they accept your vision as an individual.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist.

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

A mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art, because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character... the artist on the contrary, sees; that is to say, his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature.

My soul is sick with every day's report of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.

Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.

You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.

Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes. L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs

An artist should have more than two eyes.

Is there anything more true than human pain? Is there anything more sincere than the cry for help from those who suffer? Only a great wave of mankind's pity can surmount an immense wave of human misery?

Being a world traveler, I'm touched and moved by everything that happens, especially to children. It gets me emotionally sick and I go through a lot of pain when I see that type of pain. I can't pretend as if I don't see it. It affects me very much.

O suffering, sad humanity! O ye afflicted ones, who lie Steeped to the lips in misery, Longing, yet afraid to die, Patient, though sorely tried!