Edmund Burke Quotes

If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.

What is beauty, anyway? It's more than something pleasant looking. If it doesn't stop us in our tracks and make us unable to move for a moment, unable to put into words what's closing off the breath in our throats, then maybe it's pretty, but it probably isn't beauty.

If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that's a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.

Beauty does not linger; it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm; it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life.

The French are ... the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation of Europe, and the one that is surest to inspire admiration, hatred, terror, or pity, but never indifference.

There is something in sheer volume that awes and terrifies, lifts us out of ourselves.

Our consciences take no notice of pain inflicted on others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to us.

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

The object of music is a Sound. The end; to delight, and move various Affections in us.

Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.

The delight we experience when we allow ourselves to respond to a fairy tale, the enchantment we feel, comes not from the psychological meaning of the tale (although this contributes to it) but from its literary qualities-the tale itself as a work of art.

I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pain of others

When we view elevated ideas of Nature, the result of that view is admiration, which is always the cause of pleasure.

But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

Scared ya, did I? Aw, that's sweet. Don't worry the shocks won't kill me," she whispered. "They only make me stronger. Anyway, it was worth it to give that cow a black eye, ya know?

Pain can give you sight or make you blind.

Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don't misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their existence.

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.