Mark Rothko Quotes

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out.

The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity

There is art and beauty and power in the primal images of fantasy.

Monsters are evangelical creatures for me.

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

Before the gods that made the gods Had seen their sunrise pass, The White Horse of the White Horse Vale Was cut out of the grass.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.

I went to volcanoes where I knew that there was a lot of mythology around them; there was something like the creation of gods and monsters and demons.

The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

Percy: The Heka-what? Annabeth: The Hundred-Handed Ones. They called them that because... well, they had a hundred hands. They were the elder brothers of the Cyclopes. Tyson: Very powerful. Wonderful! As tall as the sky. So strong they can break mountains! Percy: Cool. Unless you're a mountain.

The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.

I've always been into monsters.

I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.

maybe god is a child ‘s hand)very carefully bring -ing to you and to me(and quite with out crushing)the papery weightless diminutive world with a hole in it out of which demons with wings would be streaming if something had(maybe they couldn’t agree)not happened(and floating- ly int o

I wanted to be a painter and an artist. And it's interesting that in some of my later musical works, I refer so often and associate myself with works of art.

The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.

When you understand a species' art, you understand that species.

I love art. It really changes my mood and wakes me up.

We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.

And sing to those that hold the vital shears; And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound.

The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.