Guillaume Apollinaire Quotes

The poet and the politician have this in common: their greatness depends on the courage with which they face the challenges of life.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

All men are creative but few are artists.

Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'

We artists can only go so far as the people can follow us. We are not alone, we are part of the system. We can take risks, but if you want to go to the peak of your consciousness, you may very well find yourself alone. Even if you know how to translate what you see, maybe only ten people will be able to understand what you tell. But, if you have faith in your vision, and retell it again and again, you will start noticing that, after a time, more people will begin to catch up with you.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time.

Before I think we was emcees, we was more or less narrators too. Because if you look at the early '80s hip hop, it was so much creativity goin' on with artists like then, like Slick Rick, then you had Rakim, and you had these different kind of artists back then. And we was a marble cake of all these artists. So I didn't have a problem with writin' stories because I felt like that was somethin' I loved to do. Even to this day, I really consider myself an entertainer-slash-narrator. I like to talk about stuff that goes on.

Artists are people who create beauty. That's the bottom line.

It is my opinion that the 21st century will be the century of play, and the heteroglossic activity of artists in the 20th century has been the forecast.

Artists themselves are neurotic and fearful people, and you can look at their work and figure out what they're scared of.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

All artists are entrepreneurs. All entrepreneurs are artists.

We wouldn't be artists, writers, painters, musicians, if we weren't sensitive.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.