Quotes on Ifs

If a man wants to be an artist, he should never look at pictures.

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we've spun, the tasks we've assumed, the problems we have to solve. They'll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.

If you ever get to the place where injustice doesn't bother you, you're dead.

You can't educate people that are not healthy. But you certainly can't keep them healthy if they're not educated.

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.

I am an old sinner; and if God had designed mercy for me, he would have called me home to himself before now.

If Im feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and into my pictures and hopefully transmitted to the viewer.

If only I had the Theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough.

We got anxious at the end of the weekend in our urgency to try to score the winning goal. Ended up playing far too many long balls forward. That style of play doesn't suit Manchester United. We must continue to play football and enjoy the game. If we do that, eventually things will come right for us.

If you concentrate on the present, you eliminate what happened yesterday and any apprehension of what may happen tomorrow.

Close your eyes and visualize the person you really want to be, who fits your own concepts of self-respect. If you can see the person clearly in the mirror of you mind, you surely will become that person.

Time changes everything, but with patience we can keep our desires relatively constant. If we can just hang on long enough, time will eventually create for us the conditions in which we can succeed.

If we succeed without sacrifice, it's because someone sacrificed for us.

If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.

My life has been devoted to arms, yet I look upon war at all times, and under all circumstances, as a national calamity to be avoided if compatible with national honor.

If we find ourselves increasing beyond example in numbers, in strength, in wealth, in knowledge, in everything which promotes human and social happiness, let us ever remember our dependence for all these on the protection and merciful dispensations of Divine Providence.

If we were good at everything we would have no need for each other.

We can’t practice compassion with other people if we can’t treat ourselves kindly.

If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.