Arts Quotations

I studied fine arts and architecture, but I decided to move into movie design because I grew up in a small town in the Marche region and spent a lot of time after school in the movie theater.

I trained in martial arts and wanted to become a UFC fighter. That was my goal. I only really learned how to dance three weeks prior to making 'Step Up Revolution.' Dancing will always be fun, but MMA is something I'll never give up. I will eventually get back in the octagon and be fighting professionally again.

Aside from my work, my interests lie in the arts and in world affairs.

Especially girls, but any kids exposed to music programs and arts programs do much better on their tests. They have a better chance of going to college. They can focus better. You know, we're not just automatons learning how to work machines and do engineering and math and science. All of that's great, but you've got to build a whole person.

Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile.

Growing up around Amish farmland, I enjoyed the opportunity to witness firsthand their love of family, of the domestic arts - sewing, quilting, cooking, baking - as well as seeing them live out their tradition of faith in such a unique way.

I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.

I was born and grew up in Phoenix, and I left there when I was 17 to go to Interlochen Arts Academy - a boarding school in Michigan - for a year, and then I went to college for a year at The Boston Conservatory and landed the 'Spring Awakening' tour midway through my freshman year, which was pretty cool.

I practice martial arts not to win over other people but to win over my own heart.

Anyone could be in the orchestra, or sports team, or arts club at my school. It was precisely the kind of inclusivity that now meets with a sort of scorn and derision as a prizes-for-all culture that generates only mediocrity. There's something so insulting about the idea that including lots of people means mediocrity.

I'm from Washington state - a pretty small town there called Puyallup. I was really into the arts there. I sang in choirs and did singing competitions. I also did a whole lot of theater; I did high school, and then I started doing some community theater. I decided that was the kind of thing I wanted to study in college.

I turned to my mom and said, 'I'm going to be a martial arts movie star.' She didn't believe me, and neither did my dad. They both thought I would grow out of it. That it was a phase. I decided then I was going to do it or die trying.

The role of a liberal arts college within a university is to be a genuine part of that university, giving and responding to the other parts.

The challenge to people like me is, how do you use your capabilities and resources to help support things that are important to you, whether it's the arts or education or homelessness?

I graduated from my Master of Fine Arts program for writing for children and young adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Of course, for a master's program, you have to do a ton of reading. I would get up, usually around 5:30, to do my reading; otherwise, I would fall behind.

I believe strongly in the power of arts education to engage and empower young people.

I only want my work to make people happy.

I always loved the idea of learning martial arts, but it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I really started doing it and taking up karate.

I don't mind doing action or kung fu, but I'm also really happy to do something dramatic. I'd like to show that a Chinese girl doesn't have to do crazy martial arts to get the part.

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.

My husband and I were excited about having a kid - it was having a baby that had us worried. We had a lot to learn, so like good liberal arts graduates, we signed up for a class.

Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for.

The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don't have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.

I was nerdy girl who went to Catholic school and wanted to be an engineer. I was all set to attend the Illinois Institute of Technology. And then I took a hard left turn and studied Liberal Arts at Northern Illinois University, majored in Communications. Then worked in radio as a disk jockey and as the weather girl.

I do a lot of mixed martial arts - it's like unlimited fighting. I do Brazilian jujutsu, beach volleyball. I don't like my routine to get stale, so I also lift kettle bells and push cars.

We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war.

I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'

I had teachers in high school to point me in the direction of the University of Indiana School of Music, and after IU, I went on to study at the Academy of Arts in Philadelphia. I graduated in 2006.

Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.

I've come from nowhere, and I'm not shy to go back.

I'm a martial arts buff, so anything martial arts.

I was pursuing the arts with theater in school, and I was doing after-school activities, but not in any real movement towards a professional career.

Anything we can do to encourage our young people to celebrate the arts and believe in a career in the arts is wonderful for Canada and for Canadian youth.

I watch mostly every martial arts movie... I really like movies that aren't just martial arts. I like movies that have spiritual meaning behind them, like samurai movies, or movies that have meditation.

The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums.

Including my nine years as a student, the majority of my life has been at Hokkaido University. After my retirement from the university in 1994, I served at two private universities in Okayama Prefecture - Okayama University of Science and Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts - before retiring from university work in 2002.

Performing arts was something I was always part of. That was may be the only common thread that ran throughout my education, throughout my schooling years. But apart from that, there were no friends or no long term associations. That was the only thing I knew was with me wherever I went.

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

I'm a psychologist. I was a psychology faculty member, and then I became an administrator of the department, then the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. At the time of the presidential search, I was the dean.

TV is such a great medium in what it can do in terms of enlightening an audience. We can really inspire and teach people about other people. That's a powerful tool, and that's something that the arts has always been capable of doing.

I spent three years at RMIT doing a bachelor of arts and media studies. It was a hugely formative experience. As someone who had a private Catholic school upbringing, the world suddenly became a much bigger and better place for me.

I'm very interested in heritage restoration, and I'm working with a group of people to create a number of academies and performance spaces to encourage native arts and crafts and to explore African history.

Bruce Lee loved all different styles of martial arts. He believed that you shouldn't limit yourself to one style, because martial arts is just another form of human expression.

Chadron had a water tower, grain elevators, a tanning salon, a video rental store, a small liberal arts college, a Hardee's, a stoplight, and a curling yellow sign in the pet store window that read, 'Hamsters and Tarantulas Featured Today.'

I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine.

I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.

I was always interested in the arts as a child - drawing, painting, and piano - but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school - if I wasn't in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I'd be in the art room finishing up some type of project.

I was a little press writer when the National Endowment for the Arts came to my rescue and gave me an award. I couldn't buy a light bulb. Almost more than the money, the awards are important because they show that someone believes in you.

The disintegration of the culture starts with the artist. I'm on a crusade to turn the tide in the arts, to restore dignity to the arts and, by extension, to the culture.

In professional work - certainly in the arts and graphics - 99% of people have zero courage. They blow with the wind.

I never wanted to be the next Bruce Lee. I just wanted to be the first Jackie Chan.

'Be passionate about your work and your life' was instilled in me by my mother Dada, who was a potter. She also introduced me to the arts and encouraged me to embrace the new.

I'd like to see the comics' style expanded. I'd like to see artists synthesize traditional comics arts style with fine-arts styles or whatever. I like to see innovation. I don't like it when an art form becomes stagnant.

I'm a trained martial artist. My parents were both martial artists.

I wrote my novel 'Bitter Greens' as the creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and am now looking at the history of the Rapunzel tale as my theoretical component.

I have always loved science, but I have always loved the arts - drawing, painting and, yes, writing - more.

Instead of books, art, theatre, and music being consigned to specialized niches, we might have a criticism that better reflects the eclecticism of our time, a criticism that takes in various arts all at once.

I had to jump around in the arts for a while just to survive. I earned a little money here and there, playing the guitar at union meetings, functions. I sold some science-fiction stories. I knew there was absolutely no question of me not being connected with the arts, but I couldn't find any acting jobs.

I love all the arts - so museums, theatre, music, walks near trees or by the ocean, time with people, psychological readings.

I'm not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science - and then learn to write.

Obey the principles without being bound by them.

'Immortals' was very much a martial arts based training program - a lot of body weight stuff, very little in the way of actually lifting heavy weights, and a very, very low calorie diet.

You have kids studying master class visual arts who are pushed to make films that will be successful economically; that's what they focus on. So they work for corporate interest instead of artistic expression.

I'd love to do more theatre and acting. I attended a performing arts high school in London, and it would be great to be able to put all of that training to use again.

Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

I've been chastised for going into mixed martial arts and backing out. But the reason I backed out was the terms - they wanted me ready to fight in four weeks, but you've got to be out of your mind. So I decided to go back to my roots, back to wrestling.

I'm going to change the way martial arts is viewed. I'm going to change the game. I'm going to change the way people approach fighting.

America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.

I was in martial arts starting at the age of 14, and I got my black belt by the time I was 18. Soon after, I was teaching an entire school, with about 150 students. It was unbelievably intense because of the self-awareness part of becoming a black belt.

My husband and I grew up with parents who supported our passion, and we're grateful to them for that. It really helps you find your identity when you're younger. It helps you become a really well-rounded person, the more you can show from different perspectives. The arts show us empathy, which is so important.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.

Let a durable and firm peace be established and this government be confined rigidly to the few great objects for which it was instituted, leaving the States to contend in generous rivalry to develop, by the arts of peace, their respective resources, and a scene of prosperity and happiness would follow, heretofore unequaled on the globe.

This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature - we do not understand how important the arts are - not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.

I'm really careful about not slamming my politics home in my shows, but I don't try to hide, either. The arts can be a great way to bring people together. I don't preach from the stage. I try to stay positive on solutions.

Do not let circumstances control you. You change your circumstances.

I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.

When you are learning about a martial art, it is about respect.

Cheerfully fessing up to our failures turns crazy mind off, humility and compassion on. I learned this in a karate dojo that had a strange tradition. Everyone there loved recounting failure stories, and after an evening of smacking one another, we'd sit and have a beer while the students swapped tales of martial arts disaster.

When men are prosperous, they are in love with life. Nature grows beautiful, the arts begin to flourish, there is work for painter and sculptor, the poet is born, the stage is erected - and this life with which men are in love is represented in a thousand forms.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that.

Music and the arts are not just something to make people feel good. They elevate the soul and broaden the entire personality. It's easy to say they aren't needed because culture seems intangible. But not having it deprives young people of a cultural heritage.

One of the chief considerations of the decorative arts galleries was that they should be suitable for the display of textiles, and for this initial exhibition we have chosen mainly textiles from the 15th through the 17th centuries,

One of the overriding criteria for including an object in the show was the quality of its craftsmanship, ... As long as the quality of design and the quality of production were high, it was an Arts and Crafts object.

I grew up mostly on the East Coast in Baltimore. Great education, medicine, the arts were all a given.

I wouldn't be where I am today without the amazing public arts education that I had.

When the inn remodeled in the 1950s, tons of Arts and Crafts furnishings were just thrown out or given away. Now they're so collectible, Grove Park Inn antiques have a category on eBay.

When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.

My father was a big Bruce Lee fan. He's Chinese-Hawaiian, and my mother is Chinese. He used to take us to all these really fantastical films with martial arts in them. And Bruce Lee was amazing.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

One of the things I want to do that's outside the realm of acting and the arts - although both have their place in this - is ending childhood hunger here in America.

No other performing arts group has had to go two years without a home space.

Now, we are already in the process of developing tests that measure students' ability at different grade levels in reading, language arts and math.

New Orleans is an extraordinary city; its arts and architecture are cherished by people all over the world.

My friends, all Hispanic girls, we went to school with the kids from North, Central and Alhambra, and we discovered we were not attuned to their level. 'Are they smarter than us?' we asked, ... I learned later about the arts and grammar. I don't want our kids to feel at a disadvantage when they reach high school.

I grew up in a wood cabin on Puget Sound in Manchester, Wash. My family taught me to appreciate the arts and the outdoors, and I still yearn for the absolute silence I experienced there when I was young.

I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.

I don't even like chocolate, but my eye was casting over the possibilities. I am always interested in things that have a bigger social purpose than just being commercial. If I had my way, everything we sold would have a social mission. As a nonprofit, we're not in the business of creating individual personal wealth but of building social capital. That's part of our mission. I've watched funding for arts education go down in the last 20 years. Anything we can do for integrated arts education is great - for all ages, not just kids.

I didn't get that far with the martial arts thing. My boyfriend at the time was a black belt at karate and tried to help me, but I got scared.