Quotes4study

We by our art can be called the grandsons of God. If poetry deals with moral philosophy, painting deals with natural philosophy; if poetry describes the action of the contemplative mind, painting represents the effect in motion of the action of the mind; if poetry terrifies people with the pictures of Hell, painting does the same by depicting the same things in action. If a poet challenges the painter to represent beauty, fierceness, or an evil, an ugly or a monstrous thing, whatever variety of forms he may produce in his way, the painter will cause greater satisfaction. Are there not pictures to be seen so like reality that they deceive men and animals?

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

A Christian should be a striking likeness of Jesus Christ. You have read lives of Christ, beautifully and eloquently written, but the best life of Christ is His living biography, written out in the words and actions of His people. If we were what we profess to be, and what we should be, we would be pictures of Christ; yea, such striking likenesses of Him that the world would not have to hold us up by the hour together, and say, "Well, it seems somewhat of a likeness": but they would, when they once beheld us, exclaim, "He has been with Jesus; he has been taught of Him; he is like Him; he has caught the very idea of the holy Man of Nazareth, and he works it out in his life and every day actions."--_Spurgeon._

Various     Thoughts for the Quiet Hour

>Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects, and please or displease but in memory.

_Bacon._

With it images are made to the gods; around it divine worship is conducted, of which music is a subservient ornament; by means of it pictures are given to lovers of their beloved; by it the beauties are preserved which time, and nature the mother, render fitful; by it we retain the images of famous men. And if thou wert to say that by committing music to writing you render it eternal, we do the same with letters.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

The contrary occurs in the case of the painter,--we are speaking of excellent painters and sculptors,--since the painter with great leisure sits before his work well clothed, and handles the light brush dipped in lovely colours. He wears {97} what garments he pleases; his dwelling is full of beautiful pictures, and it is clean; sometimes he has music or readers of diverse and pleasant works, which, without any noise of hammers or other confused sounds, are heard with great pleasure.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

~Land.~--There is a distinct joy in owning land, unlike that which you have in money, in houses, in books, pictures, or anything else which men have devised. Personal property brings you into society with men. But land is a part of God's estate in the globe; and when a parcel of ground is deeded to you, and you walk over it, and call it your own, it seems as if you had come into partnership with the original Proprietor of the earth.--_Beecher._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

What we're striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released and be completely free to express ourselves. That's very hard to do in the world of business. In this country, the only thing that speaks is money and you have to have the money in order to have the power to be free. So the danger is — in being as oppressive as the next guy to the people below you. We're going to do everything possible to avoid that pitfall.

George Lucas

Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

Gerald Durrell

Romance and novel paint beauty in colours more charming than Nature, and describe a happiness that man never tastes. How delusive, how destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

_Goldsmith._

Nonetheless, gazing out the train window at a random sample of the the Western world, I could not avoid noticing a kind of separation between human beings and all other species. We cut ourselves off by living in cement blocks, moving around in glass-and-metal bubbles, and spending a good part of our time watching other human beings on television. Outside, the pale light of an April sun was shining down on a suburb. I opened a newspaper and all I could find were pictures of human beings and articles about their activities. There was not a single article about another species.

Jeremy Narby

Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight / Adonis painted by a running brook; / And Cytherea all in sedges hid; / Which seem to move and wanton with her breath; / Even as the waving sedges play with wind.

_Tam. the Shrew_, Ind. 2.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin

To saunter is to enjoy life; it is to indulge the flight of fancy; it is to enjoy the sublime pictures of misery, of love, of joy, of gracious or grotesque physiognomies; it is to pierce with a glance the abysses of a thousand existences; for the young it is to desire all, and to possess all; for the old it is to live the life of the youthful, and to share their passions.

Honoré de Balzac

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Samuel Butler

The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures.

_Macb._, ii. 2.

Our ideas, like pictures, are made out of lights and shadows.

_Joubert._

Frances Ridley Havergal says: I seem to see four pictures suggested by that: under the shadow of a rock in a weary plain; under the shadow of a tree; closer still, under the shadow of His wing; nearest and closest, in the shadow of His hand. Surely that hand must be the piercèd hand, that may oftentimes press us sorely, and yet evermore encircling, upholding and shadowing!

Various     Thoughts for the Quiet Hour

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 1772-1834.     _A Day-Dream._

He strokes my hair and tells me stories and tucks me close like he's afraid I'll disappear. He paints pictures of people and places until I'm drowning in a drug of dreams to escape a world with no refuge, no relief, no release but his reassurances in my ear.

Tahereh Mafi

What 's come to perfection perishes. Things learned on earth we shall practise in heaven; Works done least rapidly Art most cherishes.

ROBERT BROWNING. 1812-1890.     _Old Pictures in Florence. xvii._

>pictures of poor people. It’s so twisted.

Kate Moretti

How many pictures have preserved the semblance of divine beauty of which time or death had in a brief space destroyed the living example: and the work of the painter has become more honoured than that of nature, his master!

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.

Boss Tweed

Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth; for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

_Bacon._

There are shades in all good pictures, but there are lights too, if we choose to contemplate them.

_Dickens._

Take Nothing but Pictures. Leave nothing but footprints. Kill nothing but time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

With crosses, relics, crucifixes, Beads, pictures, rosaries, and pixes,-- The tools of working our salvation By mere mechanic operation.

SAMUEL BUTLER. 1600-1680.     _Hudibras. Part iii. Canto i. Line 1495._

They are perfect; how else?--they shall never change: We are faulty; why not?--we have time in store.

ROBERT BROWNING. 1812-1890.     _Old Pictures in Florence. xvi._

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

Charlie Chaplin

Or where the pictures for the page atone, And Quarles is sav'd by beauties not his own.

ALEXANDER POPE. 1688-1744.     _The Dunciad. Book i. Line 139._

If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.

_Emerson._

The painter's work will be of little merit if he takes the painting of others as his standard, but if he studies from nature he will produce good fruits; as is seen in the case of the painters of the age after the Romans, who continued to imitate one another and whose art consequently declined from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine, who was born in the lonely mountains, inhabited only by goats and similar animals; and he, being drawn to his art by nature, began to draw on the rocks the doings of the goats of which he was the keeper; and thus he likewise began to draw all the animals which he met with in the country: so that after long study he surpassed not only all the masters of his age, but all those of many past centuries. After him art relapsed once more, because all artists imitated the painted pictures, and thus from century to century it went on declining, until Tomaso the Florentine, called Masaccio, proved by his perfect work that they who set up for themselves a standard other than nature, the mistress of all masters, labour in vain.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.

OLD TESTAMENT.     _Proverbs xxv. 11._

So with pictures seen from too near or too far; there is but one precise point from which to look at them, all others are too near or too far, too high or too low. Perspective determines that precise point in the art of painting. But who shall determine it in truth or morals?

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

The thoughts we have had, the pictures we have seen, can be again called back before the mind's eye and before the imagination; but the heart is not so obliging; it does not reproduce its pleasing emotions.

_Goethe._

They would talk of nothing but high life, and high-lived company, with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 1728-1774.     _The Hermit. Chap. ix._

When at eve at the bounding of the landscape the heavens appear to recline so slowly on the earth, imagination pictures beyond the horizon an asylum of hope,--a native land of love; and nature seems silently to repeat that man is immortal.--_Madame de Staël._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

What poet will place before thee in words, O {69} lover, the true semblance of thy idea with such truth as will the painter? Who is he who will show thee rivers, woods, valleys and plains, which will recall to thee the pleasures of the past, with greater truth than the painter? And if thou sayest that painting is mute poetry in itself, unless there be some one to speak for it and tell what it represents--seest thou not, then, that thy book is on a lower plane? Because even if it have a man to speak for it, nothing of the subject which is related can be seen, as it is seen when a picture is explained. And the pictures, if the action represented and the mental attributes of the figures are in the true proportion one to another, will be understood in the same way as if they spoke.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

Is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?

Charlotte Brontë

When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.

Hermann Hesse

Ye men of gloom and austerity, who paint the face of Infinite Benevolence with an eternal frown, read in the everlasting book, wide open to your view, the lesson it would teach. Its pictures are not in black and sombre hues, but bright and glowing tints; its music--save when ye drown it--is not in sighs and groans, but songs and cheerful sounds. Listen to the million voices in the summer air, and find one dismal as your own.

_Dickens._

So geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns.

JONATHAN SWIFT. 1667-1745.     _Poetry, a Rhapsody._

In some of the great halls of Europe may be seen pictures not painted with the brush, but mosaics, which are made up of small pieces of stone, glass, or other material. The artist takes these little pieces, and, polishing and arranging them, he forms them into the grand and beautiful picture. Each individual part of the picture may be a little worthless piece of glass or marble or shell; but, with each in its place, the whole constitutes the masterpiece of art.

Various     Thoughts for the Quiet Hour

Tableau vivant=--A group in which statues or pictures are represented by living persons.

French.

This represents pleasure together with pain because one is never separated from the other; they are depicted back to back because they are opposed to each other; they are represented in one body because they have the same basis, because the source of pleasure is labour mingled with pain, and the pain issues from the various evil pleasures. And it is therefore represented with a reed in its right hand which is ineffectual and devoid of strength, and the wounds inflicted by it are poisonous. In Tuscany such reeds are placed to support beds, to signify that this is the place of idle dreams, that here a great part of life is consumed, here much useful time is wasted, that is, the morning hours when the mind is sober and rested and the body disposed to start on fresh labours; there, again, many vain pleasures are enjoyed by the mind, which pictures to itself impossible things, and by the body, which indulges in those pleasures that are so often the cause of the {52} failing of life; and for this reason the reed is used as their support.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

So, from your own point of view, suppose a mind-stuff--[--Greek--]--a noumenal cosmic light such as is shadowed in the fourth gospel. The brain of a dog will convert it into one set of phenomenal pictures, and the brain of a man into another. But in both cases the result is the consequence of the way in which the respective brains perform their "function."

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

Those who try to combat the production of shoddy pictures are enemies of the best art today. Those woodland lakes in a thousand sitting-rooms with gold-tinted wallpaper belong to the profoundest inspirations of art. It always feels tragic to see people labouring to saw off the branch they are sitting on.

Asger Jorn

Objects in pictures should be so arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

_Goethe._

Thoughts we have had and pictures we have seen can be recalled by the mind; but the heart is not so obliging; it does not reproduce our pleasing emotions.

_Goethe._

As in Protestant Europe, by contrast, where sects divided endlessly into

smaller competing sects and no church dominated any other, all is different

in the fragmented world of IBM.  That realm is now a chaos of conflicting

norms and standards that not even IBM can hope to control.  You can buy a

computer that works like an IBM machine but contains nothing made or sold by

IBM itself.  Renegades from IBM constantly set up rival firms and establish

standards of their own.  When IBM recently abandoned some of its original

standards and decreed new ones, many of its rivals declared a puritan

allegiance to IBM's original faith, and denounced the company as a divisive

innovator.  Still, the IBM world is united by its distrust of icons and

imagery.  IBM's screens are designed for language, not pictures.  Graven

images may be tolerated by the luxurious cults, but the true IBM faith relies

on the austerity of the word.

        -- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988

Fortune Cookie

American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective employees

be honest and hardworking.  It has even stopped hoping for employees who are

educated enough that they can tell the difference between the men's room and

the women's room without having little pictures on the doors.

        -- Dave Barry, "Urine Trouble, Mister"

Fortune Cookie

    A reader reports that when the patient died, the attending doctor

recorded the following on the patient's chart:  "Patient failed to fulfill

his wellness potential."

    Another doctor reports that in a recent issue of the *American Journal

of Family Practice* fleas were called "hematophagous arthropod vectors."

    A reader reports that the Army calls them "vertically deployed anti-

personnel devices."  You probably call them bombs.

    At McClellan Air Force base in Sacramento, California, civilian

mechanics were placed on "non-duty, non-pay status."  That is, they were fired.

    After taking the trip of a lifetime, our reader sent his twelve rolls

of film to Kodak for developing (or "processing," as Kodak likes to call it)

only to receive the following notice:  "We must report that during the handling

of your twelve 35mm Kodachrome slide orders, the films were involved in an

unusual laboratory experience."  The use of the passive is a particularly nice

touch, don't you think?  Nobody did anything to the films; they just had a bad

experience.  Of course our reader can always go back to Tibet and take his

>pictures all over again, using the twelve replacement rolls Kodak so generously

sent him.

        -- Quarterly Review of Doublespeak (NCTE)

Fortune Cookie

    My friends, I am here to tell you of the wonderous continent known as

Africa.  Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31.

We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in

Africa.  Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule:  Up at

6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00.  Pretty soon we were back in bed by

6:30.  Now Africa is full of big game.  The first day I shot two bucks.  That

was the biggest game we had.  Africa is primerally inhabited by Elks, Moose

and Knights of Pithiests.

    The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their

annual conventions.  And you should see them gathered around the water hole,

which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water.  They

weren't looking for a water hole.  They were looking for an alck hole.

    One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my

pajamas, I don't know.  Then we tried to remove the tusks.  That's a tough

word to say, tusks.  As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were

imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out.  But in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,

but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying.

    We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed.

So we're going back in a few years...

        -- Julius H. Marx [Groucho]

Fortune Cookie

Linux supports the notion of a command line or a shell for the same reason

that only children read books with only pictures in them. Language, be it

English or something else, is the only tool flexible enough to accomplish

a sufficiently broad range of tasks.

        -- Bill Garrett

Fortune Cookie

And now your toner's toney,        Disk blocks aplenty

And your paper near pure white,        Await your laser drawn lines,

The smudges on your soul are gone    Your intricate fonts,

And your output's clean as light..    Your pictures and signs.

We've labored with your father,        Your amputative absence

The venerable XGP,            Has made the Ten dumb,

But his slow artistic hand,        Without you, Dover,

Lacks your clean velocity.        We're system untounged-

Theses and papers             DRAW Plots and TEXage

And code in a queue            Have been biding their time,

Dover, oh Dover,            With LISP code and programs,

We've been waiting for you.        And this crufty rhyme.

Dover, oh Dover,        Dover, oh Dover, arisen from dead.

We welcome you back,        Dover, oh Dover, awoken from bed.

Though still you may jam,    Dover, oh Dover, welcome back to the Lab.

You're on the right track.    Dover, oh Dover, we've missed your clean

                    hand...

Fortune Cookie

    The big problem with pornography is defining it.  You can't just

say it's pictures of people naked.  For example, you have these

primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot,

and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal

saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think

you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same

time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of

Northern Mali that you may be interested in."

    So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic

publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest

naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason

naked, or whatever.  But if National Geographic were to publish an

article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System

Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography.  But

others would not.  And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev.

Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.

        -- Dave Barry, "Pornography"

Fortune Cookie

Snow White has become a camera buff.  She spends hours and hours

shooting pictures of the seven dwarfs and their antics.  Then she

mails the exposed film to a cut rate photo service.  It takes weeks

for the developed film to arrive in the mail, but that is all right

with Snow White.  She clears the table, washes the dishes and sweeps

the floor, all the while singing "Someday my prints will come."

Fortune Cookie

"Today, of course, it is considered very poor taste to use the F-word

except in major motion pictures."

        -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#

%!     %&@%@!"

    After Snow White used a couple rolls of film taking pictures of the

seven dwarfs, she mailed the roll to be developed.  Later she was heard to

sing, "Some day my prints will come."

Fortune Cookie

I put contact lenses in my dog's eyes.  They had little pictures of cats

on them.  Then I took one out and he ran around in circles.

        -- Steven Wright

Fortune Cookie

flowchart, n. & v.:

    [From flow "to ripple down in rich profusion, as hair" + chart

"a cryptic hidden-treasure map designed to mislead the uninitiated."]

1. n. The solution, if any, to a class of Mascheroni construction

problems in which given algorithms require geometrical representation

using only the 35 basic ideograms of the ANSI template.  2. n. Neronic

doodling while the system burns.  3. n. A low-cost substitute for

wallpaper.  4. n.  The innumerate misleading the illiterate.  "A

thousand pictures is worth ten lines of code." -- The Programmer's

Little Red Vade Mecum, Mao Tse T'umps.  5. v.intrans. To produce

flowcharts with no particular object in mind.  6. v.trans. To obfuscate

(a problem) with esoteric cartoons.

        -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary"

Fortune Cookie

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