Iris Apfel Quotes

Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.

Paris must not be a cemetery. I do not wish to reign over the dead.

The power and reach of music should never be underestimated.

The power of music is real.

The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion.

A well-composed song strikes the mind and softens the feelings, and produces a greater effect than a moral work, which convinces our reason, but does not warm our feelings, nor effect the slightest alteration in our habits

Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.

What’s old doesn’t need to be old-fashioned. It gets reborn.

Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.

I think that the Almighty gave springtime to a tired world so that its peoples might know rest. I think that He gave it to a troubled world so that the world's inhabitants might find peace. I think He gave it to a discouraged world so that hope and faith might be reborn!

I really love art and I always have in every single different form and I just hope that I'm able to give some art that will touch some people and help them to be more positive and stronger.

Colors produce a spiritual vibration, the impression they create is important only as a step towards this vibration.

"The work of art must seize upon you...carry you away."

Now I've gone for too long Living like I'm not alive So I'm going to start over tonight Beginning with you and I

Music is so elevated that it is beyond the reach of intellect and there flows from it an influence which is all-potent, and which noone can explain.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.

I write music, and I want people to listen to it and care about it and have it make some difference in their lives. When I'm fortunate for that to happen, then of course I feel very, very good about it.

Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.

Sister, look ye, How, by a new creation of my tailor's I've shook off old mortality.

This should be agony. I should be a mass of aching muscle - broken, spent, unable to move. And, were I an older man, I surely would ... ... but I'm a man of thirty - of twenty again. The rain on my chest is a baptism - I'm born again.

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.

I had seen these transformations, people who had lost their will to live, coming back from their zombie states and radiating a new life force from their eyes.