Life Quotes

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

~ James Salter

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

~ Malorie Blackman

I have been afraid all my life that I am going to die. All my life it has been stuffed in my imagination.

~ Patty Duke

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.

~ John Hawkes

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

~ Karl Kraus

My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

~ Barbara Corcoran

As a little girl, my destiny was stamped onto the canvas of my imagination at 5 years old. I was watching soaps with my grandmother... The most gorgeous black women I had ever seen in my life came out, and I knew that that is what I wanted to do - be fabulous and black and on TV.

~ Niecy Nash

Every parent knows this moment in a child's age when he or she needs your attention in a very specific way because it's the beginning and ending of the early life of imagination. It's such a responsibility.

~ Nicole Ari Parker

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life, and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world, when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared, and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

~ Henning Mankell

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

~ Vince Vaughn

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

~ Wallace Stevens

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.

~ Henri Bergson

I have an imagination because my life is so boring that my imagination lets me get off the reality of what's going on.

~ Dave Attell

Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure.

~ Mordicai Gerstein

Life would have been absolutely empty without imagination.

~ Jack Williamson

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

~ Ernst Fischer

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

~ Havelock Ellis

I'm giving into my tendency to want to blur and blend the lines between art and life, and privacy and sharing.

~ Lia Ices

I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.

~ Jean-Michel Basquiat

Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.

~ Fernando Botero

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

~ Marcus Aurelius

I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art.

~ Arsene Wenger

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

~ Margaret Fuller

I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.

~ Frank Stella

Life is short, the art long.

~ Hippocrates

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

~ Barbara Kruger

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

~ Herman Hesse

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.

~ John Berger

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

~ Oscar Wilde

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

~ Pythagoras

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.

~ Gustave Courbet

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

~ Robert Musil

Art is the proper task of life.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Art should be created for life, not for the museum.

~ Jean Nouvel

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.

~ Jeff Koons

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

~ E. M. Forster

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

~ William Hazlitt

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

~ Samuel Butler

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

~ Robert Motherwell