Helen Hayes Quotes

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

For the Holy Ghost blesses us with optimism and wisdom at times of challenge that we simply cannot muster on our own.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

Your life is a work of art, and in the end, the underlying theme of great art is bravery and hope and love.

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

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

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.

It's nice to have a little bit of art to fall back on.

The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

Art is man's refuge from adversity.

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

Sometimes I feel like art is supposed to mirror life, but strangely it's as if art is trying to catch up to life, to a certain extent?

If I have a dry spell ... I wait and live harder, eyes, ears, and heart open, and when the productive time comes, it is that much richer.

Grace is the mastery of truth, the teacher of discipline, the light of the heart, the comforter of affliction, the banisher of sorrow, the nurse of devotion.

I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

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.

All of a sudden I got a vision of Guernica - Pablo Picasso's painting, which is one of my all-time favorite paintings in the world. I remember reading that it was very controversial at the time - some people said even used the word "childlike drawing" - and all of a sudden I thought, "This is like Guernica in Los Angeles!" And then it all made sense to me. It was all the elements that are the Southland.

And for so long, I had thought if I was going to write a song, or get "into" something, I had to at least smoke a joint or something. And that didn't work anymore. Once I was fairly well cleaned out, even a little bit of a drug getting into my work threw me off kilter.

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty; such as lurks In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim.

A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination.

I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through.

When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.