Robert Gould Shaw Quotes

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

I think that I'm so psychotic and so mentally ill that if I could tap into that I could do something really interesting.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

My imagination was no competition for nature.

The flame that is naturally clear always gives the most light and heat. If I could blend my talent for poetry and music into one, the light would burn still clearer, and I might go far.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

I think being an artist, or just being creative, or imaginative, or aware, where I think everybody starts out, and by about the age of 10, that's been pretty effectively whipped out by education.

A lot of people say writers start losing their powers after 60 or 65. But I look at the best-seller list and see a book by that 14-year-old gymnast, Dominique Moceanu, and I think, 'Now, what's she going to tell the world? And these 25-year-old rock stars, what are they going to tell the world?'

The really good stuff- the 'Hamiltons' - comes out after decades of writing and being committed.

Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today ... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

A lot of times people get to a certain age and they quit. I always felt sorry for the Frank Capras, the Billy Wilders, directors like that, because they quit in their sixties. Why would you quit? Think of the great work they could've done in their sixties, seventies, and on up.

Beautiful jewelry, a beautiful room - that's what museums are - a beautiful painting, a beautiful face, it makes you feel good to look at, and that's a beautiful thing.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.

n artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.

Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism would reduce the life of emotions to freezing point. And, unable to grasp the holier benefits of religion, the mysticism of the heart reacts in the art-intoxication. .... In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century.

I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?

Where there is creativity, there is hope.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

Musically, I don't think I'd ever dry up. I trust my musical invention.

To men and women who want to do things, there is nothing quite so driving as the force of an imprisoned ego. . . . All genius comes from this class.

The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.

There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing.

The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.