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It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. (Diane Ackerman)
We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion. Many refuse to admit it: I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realization that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman. (Ansel Adams)
The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers. (Scott Adams)
When I paint, mysterious things happen. What starts with a void ends with a dialogue. (Jeet Aulakh)
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. (Francis Bacon)
The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance – if it is not irrational, you make illustration. (Francis Bacon)
I am drawn to powerful, mysterious places... The 'creative haunting' of these locations has been imprinted on my spirit. (J.R. Baldini)
I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings. (Balthus)
When you make the obvious mysterious, then the mysterious becomes unavailable. (Darby Bannard)
All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. (Max Beckmann)
As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow. (Arthur Christopher Benson)
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world. (Leonard Bernstein)
There is a mysterious relationship between painting and making music. The two activities seem to feed one another. (Eleanor Blair)
No object is mysterious. The mystery is in your eye. (Elizabeth Bowen)
Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
There is no mystery about art. Do the things that you can see; they will show you those that you cannot see. By doing what you can you will gradually get to know what it is that you want to do and cannot do, and so be able to do it. (Samuel Butler)
Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies. (Samuel Butler)
There is always much more to see in a painting than its surface, when so much that is real is hidden in the depths. Yes, it has purpose, attitude or perhaps a story, but few are the divers who go to seek the treasures that are hidden below. (Leanne Cadden)
-An Open Life
Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare. (Joseph Campbell)
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious. (Thomas Carlyle)
The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery. (Carlos Castaneda)
...the art of eliciting unseen things hidden in the shadow of natural ones... and serving to demonstrate as real the things that are not. (Cennino Cennini)
What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations. (Paul Cezanne)
The circle of the compass does not invite scrutiny. The circle of the full moon is full of incident. (Rex Cole)
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people. (Edgar Degas)
A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax. (Denis Donoghue)
My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses – nature and animals... (Katherine Dunn)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all sciences. (Albert Einstein)
The ways of creation are wrapt in mystery. We may only marvel, and bow our head. (Albert Einstein)
What is this mysterious thing we all talk of so freely, and yet about which have such little, if any, comprehension? What is it that guides us and directs us outside and beyond our frail, fragile, confused egos? (Ian Factor)
Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity. (R. I. Fitzhenry)
We move between two darknesses. (E. M. Forster)
I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded in mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it. (Harry Emerson Fosdick)
My imagination unlocks the mysteries of Life's unexplainable phenomena that railroad my existence. (Amber Joy French)
-to Robert Genn after a seminar...
They are all looking for the secret, and the secret is that there is no secret. (a friend)
If instead of a figure you put the shadow only of a person, you have found an original starting point, that strangeness of which you have calculated. (Paul Gauguin)
Oh mysterious world... I have become better for having understood and having loved thy human soul – a flower which has ceased to bloom and whose fragrance no one henceforth will breathe. (Paul Gauguin)
People suspend judgment in the presence of mystery. (Robert Genn)
Art is a mystery and it is the artist's vocation to journey through that mystery, dwell in it, experience it, and express it. (Claudio Ghirardo)
I want every image to be the beginning of an unseen image. (Kahlil Gibran)
If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. (Malcolm Gladwell)
All subjects not to mention objects are mysterious. (Sherry Grauer)
Seek the mystery in life; for it is the mysteries, not the certainties, that make life exciting and worthwhile. (Hap Hagood)
The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life.' (Keith Haring)
Whatever it is that makes a person charming, it needs to remain a mystery. Once the charmer is aware of a mannerism or characteristic that others find charming, it ceases to be a mannerism and becomes an affectation. And good Lord, there is nothing less charming than affectations! (Rex Harrison)
I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. (Ernest Hemingway)
All my thinking about art is haunted by a mystical belief that in its practice one is tapping sources of truth. (Roger Hilton)
The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labour satisfies. (Lewis Hyde)
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain. (Carl Jung)
The secret of artistic creation and the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of 'participation mystique' – to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual... (Carl Jung)
My pictures had and have secret lives, and so there were things I did not tell, a lot of stuff I did not say back then which I'm saying now... I intend to continue allowing forms of secret life to paintings I'm working on right now because it excites me to do that... (R. B. Kitaj)
Everything vanishes round me and good works rise from me of their own accord. (Paul Klee)
It is mysterious how insight and energy seem to come and go from our studios as they please. (Philip Koch)
Don't be mysterious about life or art. We will have to undress our mind... silence the background music. We all have so many prejudices in our thinking. We should try to share. (Girish Kumar)
I am inspired when the elements and forces of nature combine to form strange and transcendental appearances... sometimes subtle, sometimes dynamic, they act as portals to a mystical realm. (Diana Lehr)
You cannot predict what the next step is; you just have to do it. It's so mysterious. (Hui Lin Liu)
-Every Day Art, volume 35, Spring, 1957
I paint the fog - I think of its fresh moistness - its stillness - its mystery. (Douglas Lockwood)
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself. (Eric Maisel)
The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness. (Andre Malraux)
Gesture! The paint thrills the canvas; an idea is born! I have become the
wind and the wind-borne cloud. I am embraced by the divine mysteries. (Louisa McElwain)
I don't know of any good work of art that doesn't have a mystery. (Henry Moore)
Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble. (Giorgio Morandi)
-from The Book of Mirdad...
If then, your world be such a baffling riddle, it is because you are that baffling riddle. And if your speech be such a woeful maze, it is because you are that woeful maze. (Mikhail Naimy)
There are places, just as there are people and objects... whose relationship of parts creates a mystery. (Paul Nash)
It is Mystery - the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event - or accident - in any life on earth... (Eugene O'Neill)
Art is most effective when concealed. (Ovid)
Extremes in nature equal ends produce / In man they join to some mysterious use. (Alexander Pope)
The thing that interests us and delights us is the strangeness of the world, its surprises and mysteries, the impossibility of explaining it. (Kerig Pope)
The artist and the fundamentalist both confront the same issue, the mystery of their existence as individuals. (Steven Pressfield)
The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. (Steven Pressfield)
The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish... (Herbert Read)
Magic. Mystery. Mood. Maybe that's what we all seek in a painting... a touchstone of experience. (Stella Reinwald)
More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Mystery is like a kind of atmosphere which bathes the greatest works of the masters. (Auguste Rodin)
The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why. (Jean Rostand)
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise. (Bertrand Russell)
It is connecting the outer and inner states of being with the mystery of the unknown that reveals the visual statement with awe. (Linda Saccoccio)
Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)
I deal primarily with mystery and in the presentation of mystery. If I cast someone in plaster, it is the mystery of a human being that is presented. If I put him next to an object, it also raises a question about the nature of that object. (George Segal)
There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. (Buffalo Springfield)
Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason in human affairs. (Thomas Szasz)
Things forbidden have a secret charm. (Tacitus)
Never reveal everything in a painting; leave half out. You must leave mystery for the viewer. (Howard Terpning)
A cloudy sky to make it mysterious and a fog to increase the mystery. Just imagine how suggestive things are... (John H. Twachtman)
Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. (Mark Twain)
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced. (Aart Van Der Leeuw)
Exaggerate the essential; leave the obvious vague. (Vincent van Gogh)
Our beings are full of coincidence and mystery, and often times we do not have a choice. (Milos Vujasinovic)
The final mystery is oneself... Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul. (Oscar Wilde)
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. (Oscar Wilde)
The scenery of mountains painted on the ever-changing azure canvas of the sky, the mysterious mechanism of the human body, the rose, the green grass carpet, the magnanimity of souls, the loftiness of minds, the depth of love – all these things remind us of a God who is beautiful and noble. (Paramahansa Yogananda)
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