Mona Lisa Quotes - Page 2

• . . . a jostling scrum of office buildings so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce - like a basketball team standing shoulder to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.

  Prince Charles

  Basketball, Team, Frustration

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• Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Together, Hammers, Way

  Chuck Palahniuk (2003). “Diary: A Novel”, Doubleday Books

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• The horizon is an imaginary line that recedes as you approach it.

  Ginnifer Goodwin

  Dream, Vision, Horizon

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• Did you ever see that painting the Mona Lisa. It always reminds me of a reporter listening to a politician.

  Robert Orben

  Listening, Politics, Painting

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• What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.

  Abbas Kiarostami

  Art, Book, Years

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• I was to Japanese visitors to Washington what the Mona Lisa is to Americans visiting Paris.

  John C. Danforth

  Paris, Visitors, Visiting

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• Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

  Daniel Tammet

  Beautiful, Unique, Symphony

  Daniel Tammet (2007). “Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”, p.185, Simon and Schuster

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• Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.

  Sol LeWitt

  Art, Ideas, Form

  "Sol LeWitt by Saul Ostrow". Interview with Saul Ostrow, bombmagazine.org. October 1, 2003.

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• Burn the Louvre, and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Names, Wipe, Way

  Chuck Palahniuk (2005). “Fight Club: A Novel”, p.141, W. W. Norton & Company

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• One minute you're bleeding. The next minute you're hemorrhaging. The next minute you're painting the Mona Lisa.

  Mac O'Grady

  Golf, Bleeding, Next

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• I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.

  Pierre Boulez

  Add, Moustache, Enough

  Pierre Boulez, Martin Cooper (1990). “Orientations: Collected Writings”, p.481, Harvard University Press

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• My movies are film-paintings - moving portraits captured on celluloid. I'll layer that with sound to create a unique mood -- like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth, and there would be a wind, and she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange and beautiful.

  David Lynch

  Beautiful, Moving, Unique

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• Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Suicide, Self Harm, Fall

  Chuck Palahniuk (2005). “Fight Club: A Novel”, p.49, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.

  Pierre Boulez

  Art, Past, Doe

  "Boulez in his own words" by Claire Kohda Hazelton, www.theguardian.com. March 26, 2015.

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• I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.

  Alan Bradley

  Self, Two, Laughing

  Alan Bradley (2016). “The Flavia de Luce Series 7-Book Bundle”, p.488, Delacorte Press

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• I was sick of people making fun of my hair and so I cut it off and I've got much more attention than ever before. It was like when Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1906 - three times more people came to see where it used to be.

  Emo Philips

  Fun, Cutting, Hair

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• Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.

  William S. Burroughs

  Rocks, Rock And Roll, Storm

  William S. Burroughs (2007). “Naked Lunch: The Restored Text”, p.38, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• You cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Dabs, Paint, Accomplish

  William F. Buckley Jr. (2010). “Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations: A William F. Buckley Jr. Omnibus”, p.41, Encounter Books

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• Could Hamlet have been written bya committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the NewTestament have been composed as a conference report?

  Alfred Whitney Griswold

  Clubs, Conferences, Committees

  1957 Baccalaureate address, 9 Jun.

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• Pat Nixon was called the Mona Lisa of American politics. She never wrote anything. Her interviews tell us nothing.

  Oliver Stone

  Interviews, American Politics

  Source: www.rogerebert.com

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• You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!'

  Harlan Coben

  Ideas, People, Lasts

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• For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains

  Angela Carter

  Fun, Cat, Thinking

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• Leonardo's Mona Lisa sure would have lost out if he had spent only 2 of the 4 or 5 years he took to complete it. It is thinking about him and Ryder, among others, that partly makes me feel so awful to send away a 'half-baked' painting.

  E. J. Hughes

  Time, Thinking, Years

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• I'm a producer. I'm a musician. And my job is to come in and, you know, put - you know, I treat all of the artists that I work with, like, you know, the way da Vinci was looking at Mona Lisa, you know, there's an interesting backdrop.

  Pharrell Williams

  Jobs, Artist, Interesting

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.

  Cornell Woolrich

  Writing, Venus De Milo, Creative

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