Romain Rolland Quotes

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we're a part.

I have been taking every step toward the future every day through making many paintings and sculptures with my deep emotion hidden in my life.

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.

I am so enriched because so much has happened in my life. The way I can express myself is because of the life I have led. It's only when you experience life can you emote it.

One of the reasons I took up acting was to learn to be more human, to get in touch with human emotions.

Every once in a while, I'll have an acting role that allows me to look at something in my life and work it out.

My films are always a reflection of where I am in my life.

The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.

If life is a blank canvas and all people are artists, the big challenge we all face may be expressed this way: Will we ultimately produce something approaching a masterpiece, an acceptable but not particularly memorable work of art, or a creation that wouldn't even be purchased at a yard sale?

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

The breakage and agony rending us today will be our salvation if they drive us by new routes to meet it. No one can proxy for us a masterpiece of loving or experience for us the rapture of art or launch for us book ships freighted with sweet bread to strengthen man. As of old we must be our own seers, musicians and explorers, and to an extent vaster than ever before.

The essential element in nurturing our creativity lies in nurturing ourselves.

The instinct that pulls us toward art is the impulse to evolve, to learn, to heighten and elevate our consciousness. The Ego hates this. Because the more awake we become, the less we need the Ego.

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

I feel like you can't really be truthful as an artist and empathize with the human experience, unless you know your truth and you're not living a lie. So I'm learning through it, and it's making me a better person, and it's making me a better artist, I think.

It's important to be yourself. What art does for everyone, helps you understand yourself and in a distilled way, whether it's a painting or a scene in acting or a joke. It distills something about everyday life that can be important to you.

There is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who recognize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but are bound up with the development of the individual's own feeling, thinking and acting. The genuine artists, investigators and thinkers have always been persons of this kind. However inconspicuously the life of these individuals runs its course, none the less the fruits of their endeavors are the most valuable contributions which one generation can make to its successors.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.