Statues Quotes - Page 2

• As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Real, Men, Rome

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.90, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• Many have lived on a pedestal who will never have a statue when dead.

  Pierre-Jean de Beranger

  Pedestal, Fame

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• A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

  Hippolyte Taine

  Ideas, Iron, Fixed

  Hippolyte Taine (1875). “Notes on Paris”, p.58

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• Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

  Denis Diderot

  Men, Genius, Madness

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• Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Heart, Breathing, Silence

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Music”

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• Altars should face the east, and should always be placed on a lower level than are the statues in the temples, so that those who are praying and sacrificing may look upwards towards the divinity.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Sacrifice, East, Looks

  "De architectura (Ten Books on Architecture)". Book by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (Book IV, Chapter IX, Section 1), circa 15 BC.

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• I can't imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

  Madeleine Albright

  Father, Imagine, Raised

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• The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying, 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.' She's got a baseball bat and yelling, 'You want a piece of me?'

  Robin Williams

  Funny, Baseball, Tired

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• I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

  Steven Wright

  Museums, Arms, Comedy

  "Steven Wright Special". Comedy, 1985.

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• He who is continually changing his point of view sees more, and more clearly, than one who, statue-like, forever stands upon the same pedestal; however lofty and well-placed that pedestal may be.

  Arthur Helps

  Views, Forever, Pedestal

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• We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

  Walter Scott

  Responsibility, Snow, Matrimony

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• ... knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.

  Albert Einstein

  Educational, Hands, Order

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.26, Open Road Media

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• When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

  Randall Jarrell

  Mother, Country, Law

  "The Obscurity of the Poet," Harvard University lecture, published in "Poetry and the Age" by Randall Jarrell, 1953.

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• Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.

  Carl Sagan

  Ideas, Icons, Wish

  Carl Sagan (2006). “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God”, p.48, Penguin

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• 

  Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Artist, Thinking, Perspective

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2015). “The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)”, p.1086, e-artnow

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• How can the mind be so imperfect?" she says with a smile. I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose. "It may well be imperfect," I say, "but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow." "Where do the lead?" "To oneself," I answer. "That's where the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere." I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall. "Not one thing is your fault," I comfort her.

  Haruki Murakami

  Wall, Winter, Moon

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• The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Running, Men, Squares

  Charles Baudelaire (1986). “The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays”

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• The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Imagination, Criticism

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.102, Courier Corporation

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• Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Simple, Interesting, Humanity

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• I am just...wondering, where is the glow of yesteryear? I'm wondering where the heroes went. Gosh, I don't know how long ago they left. Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better. Interweave all these communities, and you really have an America that is back on its feet, a comfortable nation to live in again. I really think we're gonna have to reassess what constitutes a hero.

  Tom McCall

  Hero, Responsibility, Thinking

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• The Statue of Liberty means everything. We take it for granted today. We take it for granted. Remember the Statue of Liberty stands for what America is. We as Democrats have to remind ourselves and remind the country the great principles we stand for. This is a place of protection. This is not a country of bullies. We are not an empire. We are the light. We are the Statue of Liberty.

  Jerry Springer

  Country, Mean, Light

  "Leaving the Fold". "This American Life" podcast, 258, www.thisamericanlife.org. January 30, 2004.

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• The Marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City." Old Bailey nodded, sagely: "What, the big white buggers? They're down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them." A moment of silence. Old Naeiley handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand, and snapped it, like a crocodile hand, at the Carabas. "It was OK," gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. "He had another.

  Neil Gaiman

  New York, Hands, Cities

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• Maybe in the morning, sunlight would to turn him back into a statue; then I could take Stone out to the forest where he could frolic among the ferns, gurgle at streams, and make friends with the other interesting rocks.

  Devon Monk

  Morning, Rocks, Interesting

  Devon Monk (2009). “Magic in the Shadows: An Allie Beckstrom Novel”, p.134, Penguin

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• ...It looked very different from the Statue of Liberty, but what did that matter? What was the good of having the statue without the liberty, the freedom to go where one chose if one was held back by one's color? No, I preferred the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises." ~ Josephine Baker, once she had seen the Eiffel Tower

  Josephine Baker

  Color, Promise, Liberty

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• The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Lying, Expression

  "Search for the Real: And Other Essays". Book by Hans Hofmann. "Painting and Culture", p. 55, 1948.

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