163 Quotes by Irving Stone

Many times in your life you may think you are failing, but ultimately you will express yourself and that expression will justify your life.

They had painted in a grand rush to keep intact the purity of their first impression, the mood in which the motif had been conceived.

Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people’s successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.

Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only – he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.

Alla guerra di amor vince chi fugge.

Listen, my friend, all forms that exist in God’s universe can be found in the human figure. A man’s body and face can tell everything he represents. So how could I ever exhaust my interest in it?

Drawing is the poet’s written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

Do you know the anecdote about Rubens? He was serving Holland as Ambassador to Spain and used to spend the afternoon in the royal gardens before his easel. One day a jaunty member of the Spanish Court passed and remarked, ‘I see that the diplomat amuses himself sometimes with painting,’ to which Rubens replied, ‘No, the painter amuses himself sometimes with diplomacy!

You are a grand nerveux, Vincent,” Doctor Rey had told him. “You never have been normal. But then, no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.