Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’…but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is not confined to sweet sounds.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. ... It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.

There is nothing more musical than a sunset.

Without emotion there is no beauty

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds. . . . But though I greatly delight In these and the water lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

Wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don't even understand.

It is the search for beauty...That is what it is. We find ourselves on this earth--gods and men--and we know that it is beautiful. That is one of the few things we understand--beauty; because it is there, in the world, and we can see it all about us. We want beauty. It requires our love. It just does.

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul.

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

Sex was like a world so mysterious to me, I really couldn't believe there was this fantastic texture to life that I was getting to do...it has all these different levels, from lust and fearful, violent sex to the real spiritual thing at the other end. It's the key to some fantastic mystery of life.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

Beauty is undefinable in language. It's something that you see when you see it, or you feel when you feel it, or you hear when you hear it. It usually encompasses all five of the senses. It can't exist without it being a somehow sensorial experience. But, I don't think it's quantifiable. Nothing is really quantifiable. Nothing is certain in love and friendship. We all try to understand these things.

What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

You really should be able to feel the higher power of music and be moved by it, rather than listening to me waffle on and having to explain it.

The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.