Famous Quotes & Sayings

Maya Angelou

Without defeats, how do you really know who the hell you are? If you never had to stand up to something - to get up, to be knocked down, and to get up again - life can walk over you wearing football cleats. But each time you do get up, you're bigger, taller, finer, more beautiful, more kind, more understanding, more loving. Each time you get up, you're more inclusive. More people can stand under your umbrella.

Maya Angelou

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

Maurice Sendak

I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.

Maurice Sendak

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures.

John Ruskin

Our respect for the dead, when they are just dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the epitaph.

John Ruskin

Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

John Ruskin

To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.

John Ruskin

All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.

John Ruskin

Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. None of us knows what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought-proof against all adversity. Bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure houses of precious and restful thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us.

John Ruskin

I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the earth.

John Ruskin

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

John Ruskin

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

John Powell

You and I can profit by asking ourselves: What do I see when I look through the lens of my attitude toward myself? Am I more a critic than a friend? Do I look beyond the surface blemishes to find the truly beautiful and unique person that I am? Or do I play the destructive "comparison game"? What verdict does the juror of my mind pass on me: "good at heart" or "guilty on all counts"?

Norman Cousins

To be able to rise from the earth; to be able, from a station in outer space, to see the relationship of the planet earth to other planets; to be able to contemplate the billions of factors in precise and beautiful combination that make human existence possible; to be able to dwell on an encounter of the human brain and spirit with the universe

Nina Garcia

Style is about fun. True style is not about having a closet full of expensive and beautiful things - it is instead about knowing when, where, and how to utilize your collection.

Mitch Albom

Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: comfort, love, and a peaceful heart.

Mitch Albom

Having more does not keep you from wanting more. And if you always want more - to be richer, more beautiful, more well known - you are missing the bigger picture, and I can tell you from experience, happiness will never come

Mitch Albom

It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be.

Mitch Albom

You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you competitive. And, age is not a competitive issue.

Mitch Albom

Because one thing God gave us- and I'm afraid it's at times a little too much- is freewill. Freedom to choose. I believe he gave us everything needed to build a beautiful world, if we choose wisely.

Mitch Albom

Love- the infatuation kind- 'he's so handsome, she's so beautiful'- that can shrivel. As soon as something goes wrong, that kind of love can fly out the window.

Mike Yaconelli

Christianity is not about learning how to live within the lines; Christianity is about the joy of coloring. The grace of God is preposterous enough to accept as beautiful a coloring that anyone else would reject as ugly. The grace of God sees beyond the scribbling to the heart of the scribbler - a scribbler who is similar to two thieves who hung on crosses on either side of Jesus. One of the two asked Jesus to please accept his scribbled and sloppy life into the kingdom of God and He did. Preposterous. And very good news for the rest of us scribblers.

John Henrik Clarke

To be black and beautiful means nothing in this world unless we are black and powerful.

John Henry Newman

Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea.

John Henry Newman

All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from God.

John Henry Newman

Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of the (angel's) garments, the waving robes of those whose faces see God.

John Harington

Five qualities there are wine's praise advancing; Strong, beautiful, fragrant, cool and dancing.

John Guare

All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs.

John Guare

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

John Galliano

I think people should have fun with fashion, should enjoy wearing beautiful clothes--but also not save everything for the best. Fashion is there to be enjoyed, to be indulged--to wow in. Don't save it for Sunday best only. Get it out of the tissue paper and be sensational every day.

John Galsworthy

I am still under the impression that there is nothing alive quite so beautiful as a thoroughbred horse.

John Frusciante

Even if my songs are a bit low-spirited, they make me happy. I become happy when I hear sad songs. When you sing about sad things in a beautiful way, the atmosphere turns upside down

John Dos Passos

But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.