Excerpt from "The Art of Living Joyfully"
Arts
by Allen Klein
“I am always looking for ideas that help people enrich their lives. This book does just that. I highly recommend you read it and embrace its wise, and sometimes witty, words. They will feed your soul, lift your spirits, and help you live a fuller, richer, and more joy-filled life.”
SARK
(Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy) Founder and CEO of PlanetSARK
Introduction
Psychoneuroimmunology is a long word with a short, simple concept. It means that the body, mind and spirit are interconnected. In other words, your mind can influence your body. What you think affects how you feel. Of course, what you think consists mainly of words—and those words have the power to drag you down or lift you up.
The quotations in this book were all selected to help you experience the latter. To get the full effect, try posting a few where you see them regularly. Add one a day to the screen-saver on your computer, put one at the end of your emails, or email one daily to someone whose spirit needs a lift.
It almost doesn’t matter how you use these quotes. The important thing is that you use them on a regular basis. If you do, they can help keep your spirits high so that you will be mentally, physically and spiritually healthier.
Arts
Art
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
Robert Motherwell
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo Picasso
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
Art is a staple, like bread or wine or a warm coat in winter. Man’s spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.
Irving Stone
The object of art is to give life a shape.
Jean Anouilh
The artist has a special task and duty; the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
Lewis Mumford
Each of us is an artist, capable of conceiving and creating a vision from the depths of our being. Dorothy Fadiman
All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another; and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.
John Ruskin
The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them. Goethe
Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life, and from their hands it comes in fair, articulate forms to bless the world.
Josiah Gilbert Holland
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.
Simone Weil
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
Michelangelo
The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.
Auguste Rodin
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.
Pablo Picasso
Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.
Kahlil Gibran
Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see—to see correctly—and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.
Kimon Nicolaides
Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world. I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.
Frederick Franck
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
Dance
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
Havelock Ellis
The body says what words cannot.
Martha Graham
Dancing is the body made poetic.
Ernst Bacon
The trouble with nude dancing is that not everything stops when the music stops.
Sir Robert Helpmann
Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once!
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you can walk, you can dance.
Zimbabwean saying
Music
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle
Music is the child of prayer, the companion of religion.
Chateaubriand
Music is the art of the prophets, the only art that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.
Martin Luther
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.
Plato
We are full of rhythms . . . our pulse, our gestures, our digestive tracts, the lunar and seasonal cycles. Yehudi Menuhin
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
Henry David Thoreau
The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other is by music.
Jonathan Edwards
When words leave off, music begins.
Heinrich Heine
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
Music is the universal language of mankind.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief that does not find relief in music.
George Eliot
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
Pat Conroy
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington
God respects me when I work, but loves me when I sing.
Rabindranath Tagore
We all have music inside us, and can learn how to get it out, one way or another.
Frank Wilson
Poetry
Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises. Edith Sitwell
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.
Jean Paul
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men’s souls.
James Russell Lowell
The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making his life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see— and what we see is life.
Robert Penn Warren
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.
Edward Hubbell Chapin
The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.
Socrates
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold
When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.
John F. Kennedy
When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
Stephen Spender
There is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert
Based in San Francisco, Allen Klein is an award-winning professional speaker and author. His books Inspiration for a Lifetime, Change Your Life!, and The Healing Power of Humor have sold over 500,000 copies combined. He is the world’s only certified Jollytologist®.
Purchase info:
The Art of Living Joyfully: How to Be Happier Every Day of the Year
By Allen Klein
ISBN: 978-1-936740-19-2
Trade Paper, $15.95
6” x 7”, 156 pages
Publishing on World Smile Day, October 5, 2012
Contact: Brenda Knight, (510) 845-8000, bknight@vivaeditions.com
www.vivaeditions.com
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