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We grow because we struggle, we learn and overcome. (Robert G. Allen)
Struggling against too much detail in the scene – painting as a camera would see – is a common problem for many artists. (Kenn Backhaus)
A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is a struggle with the object. (Francis Bacon)
The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions. (Darby Bannard)
I begin with an idea, but as I work, the picture takes over. Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived... and the picture that fights for its own life. (Georg Baselitz)
You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity. (Hal Borland)
Always remember that striving and struggle precede success, even in the dictionary. (Sarah Ban Breathnach)
-In Praise of the Fighters (song), 1930...
There are men who struggle for a day and they are good. There are men who struggle for a year and they are better. There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives:
These are the indispensable ones. (Bertolt Brecht)
Sometimes you struggle so hard to feed your family one way, you forget to feed them the other way, with spiritual nourishment. Everybody needs that. (James Brown)
No, when the fight begins within himself, / A man's worth something. (Robert Browning)
It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. (Gautama Buddha)
It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle. (Albert Camus)
The pictorial battlefield becomes a sea of mud mercifully veiled by the fog of war. (Winston Churchill)
-Lovers in a Dangerous Time...
But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight -- / Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight. (Bruce Cockburn)
The artist's struggle to transcend his pain can become the seed for many others' hope, transforming a personal journey into a vision for us all. (Diane Cole)
The artist has to struggle all his life to disentangle his vision from all the things his intellect has put into it, and never quite succeeds at the best. (John Collier)
The mere fact that you have obstacles to overcome is in your favor... (Robert Collier)
We each have our own personal cutting edge, and once we slip back from it into some kind of complacency where experimentation and struggle are no longer necessary, we may as well hang it up. (Warren Criswell)
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. (e. e. cummings)
When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy. (Richard Diebenkorn)
The daily struggle does not arise from a purpose or a program, but from an immediate need. (Albert Einstein)
-in Oraibi, Arizona...
The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves; banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred way and in celebration. We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Hopi Elder)
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. (T. S. Eliot)
Sometimes I wonder whether the struggle to transcend and to feel one has fallen short doesn't communicate itself in some way and actually add to the humanity of the work, which is what it's all about. (Michael Epp)
All artists struggle to some degree with their emotional and creative output. (Michael Fantuz)
Painters often seem to be involved in a great struggle with those things they have the greatest difficulty mastering... It is as though the artist is always working a little bit beyond his area of competence, stubbornly doing what is to some degree impossible. (Alan Feltus)
It's difficult to have fun or to achieve concentration when your ego is engaged in what it thinks is a life-and-death struggle. (W. Timothy Gallwey)
I do know, for most of us, the very best of times are when you're in your own space sweating, trying to squeeze quality out of imperfect capabilities. (Robert Genn)
-The Art Student's Workbook...
Art is often born from inner struggle. Artists are plagued by impulses they must express. Contentment does not seek action but struggle always seeks release, and for the creative it can take the form of art. (Eric Gibbons)
Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain. (Kahlil Gibran)
A person always has control over how she meets her adversities, and the good news is that the facing of them, one after another, year after year, builds an inner strength that nobody can take away from you. (Gail Godwin)
Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. (Natalie Goldberg)
- at Bempton Cliffs, UK...
Struggling to stand there on a freezing cold day, I realised that to pitch an easel would have meant watching it disappear to be resurrected as flotsam! (Shirley Goodsell)
If art is hard, it's because you're struggling to go beyond what you know you can do. (Irwin Greenberg)
There is always a struggle, a striving for something bigger than yourself in all forms of art. And even if you don't achieve greatness, even if you fail, which we all must, everything you do in your work is somehow connected with your attitude toward life... (Rex Harrison)
Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy. (Vaclav Havel)
Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order. (Robert Henri)
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. (William James)
What nourishes me also destroys me. (Angelina Jolie)
In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world. (Franz Kafka)
The struggle between art and mastery is like the struggle between spontaneity and persistence. When they become one, it is indeed rare and hard won. (Paul Kane)
While producing art works, illusions appear from time to time due to my mental illness. Every day is a struggle for me. (Yayoi Kusama)
Every action we take, everything we do, is either a victory or defeat in the struggle to become what we want to be. (Ninon de L'Enclos)
In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher. (Dalai Lama)
The bear is what we all wrestle with. Everybody has their bear in life. It's about conquering that bear and letting him go. (Jennifer Lopez)
Let the bad times roll! I'm loving every minute of the struggle. (Mary Madsen)
An artist must struggle to accept the shape of this universe – and achieve some important successes... (Eric Maisel)
I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. (Sally Mann)
Sometimes the greatest thing to come out of all your hard work isn't what you get for it, but what you become for it. (Steve Maraboli)
A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements. (Orison Swett Marden)
Struggle is a necessary path in any creative accomplishment; staying with it brings
success. (Billie F. Mathis)
After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there. (Henri Matisse)
A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. (Rollo May)
Life is not a struggle. It's a wiggle. (Peter McWilliams)
All great works of art are trophies of victorious struggle. (Julius Meier-Graefe)
Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in order to become truly alive. (Michael Michalko)
I've got a feeling that, if it's so easy for you, the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say. (Charles Mingus)
The function of art is to struggle against obligation. (Amedeo Modigliani)
For almost two months now I've been struggling away with no result. (Claude Monet)
Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character. (Elizabeth Moon)
In order to make truly personal work, one has to struggle with intent and content as well as with techniques. And technique is the easiest thing to learn in art. (Gabriella Morrison)
A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem. (Robert Motherwell)
The most excellent jihad (struggle) is that for the conquest of self. (Muhammad)
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous. (Iris Murdoch)
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Better to fight for something than live for nothing. (George Smith Patton, Jr.)
You should see me when they [the paintings] don't work out. I won't leave until I can get them to a point. Sometimes it's a struggle, and I'm sweating, I break out in sweat. This whole idea of the euphoric artist in the studio... painting can be that, but it sometimes isn't, it's a lot of work. (Ross Penhall)
If I struggle with a painting, and find the wisdom at the time to know I'm struggling, it is because my inner child has been neglected. When I invite my inner child back into 'the picture' my struggling dissolves. (Jim Pescott)
My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art. (Pablo Picasso)
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. (Plato)
When a man's struggle begins within oneself, the man is worth something. (Plutarch)
Just knowing what areas one may struggle with takes the demons out of the dark and allows us to get a better handle on them. (Laury Ravenstein)
The most difficult battle you ever fight is the battle to be unique in a world that will marshal its every force to keep you the same. (James Arthur Ray)
What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large... (Rainer Maria Rilke)
All my life, affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it. (George Bernard Shaw)
I enjoy the struggle, because the outcome is always better when there is a struggle. (Mian Situ)
The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor. If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved. (Samuel Smiles)
The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure... you are above everything distressing. (Baruch Spinoza)
-to J. Dudley Johnston, 15 October 1923...
I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot. (Alfred Stieglitz)
Working spontaneously can be tiring because you are struggling with your instinctive urge to control everything. (Ken Strong)
Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable. (Tacitus)
It is the destiny of the theater nearly everywhere and in every period to struggle even when it is flourishing. (Howard Taubman)
I am certainly not regenerating French art, but am struggling hard to accomplish something on an unlucky piece of paper which has done me no harm at all, and on which, believe me, I am doing nothing that is good... I hope things will improve eventually; as it is, I am pretty wretched. (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec)
Overcoming large obstacles, addictions and self-created disasters have contributed to my unique view and appreciation of life... but the place I feel the most ready and able to produce art is a stable and loving environment. (Sandy Triolo)
We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain. (Mark Twain)
-Bluebeard...
I think... it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain.' (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, while others fought to win the prize and sailed through bloody seas? (Isaac Watts)
-The Path to Twelve-Note Composition, 1932...
The time was simply ripe for the disappearance of tonality. Naturally this was a fierce struggle; inhibitions of the most frightful kind had to be overcome, the panic fear, 'Is that possible, then?' So it came about that gradually a piece was written, firmly and consciously, that wasn't in a definite key any more. (Anton Webern)
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. (Orson Welles)
Every painting is a war. You have to struggle every day, and to struggle every day with your inadequacies is a damn nuisance. (Neil Welliver)
Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. (Tennessee Williams)
My big struggle has been how to expand my mind without being able to expand my physical experience of the world. (Peter Wolf)
-The Helga Pictures
My struggle is to preserve that abstract flash - like something you caught out of the corner of your eye, but in the picture you can look at it directly. (Andrew Wyeth)
There are always two forces warring against each other within us. (Paramahansa Yogananda)
I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. (Emile Zola)
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