Robert Adams Quotes

My painting is not violent, it's life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

I think life is perverse. It can be beautiful, but it won't.

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will.

And as I have always said, the only thing more scary than knowing we are not alone in the universe is knowing we are alone in the universe.

What can we do about God, who makes and then breaks every god-forsaken, beautiful day?

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.

We think a flower on a cliff is beautiful Because we stop our feet at the cliff's edge Unable to step out into the sky Like that fearless flower --Sosuke Aizen,Flower on the Precipice

This is unstoppable, no holds barred. This is beautiful. Crazy. A beginning. Betrayal. Addictive. Aggressive. Alive. This is something to be afraid of.

And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.

What we humans think we know is nothing compared to what we need to believe to numb the fear and pain.

I think it's my job or the artist's job, to try and find some solution or some reason to accept things. But given the grimmest reality, I feel the grimmest facts are the real facts, the true facts: that you're born, you die, you suffer, it's to no purpose, and you're gone forever, ever, ever, and that's it.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.

Unless you can surround yourself with as many beautiful things as you can afford, I don't think life has very much meaning.

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.

I think we all try to figure out ways to ignore the fact that life is about suffering. In the modern world, that's what we're surrounded with. We have all these little tools, such as phones and the Internet, to help us forget about suffering. Whenever you are tired, you don't have to really sit in the abyss of what it means to be alive. We always find ways to avoid it. When a ship sinks, you are sitting in it. There is no way to avoid.

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

But it's not only: What are you going to do about touring, it's: What are you going to do with your life? Is there a point to what we do? I think there is. Making music, creating beautiful things. We have to be in love with the good and the beautiful. If we are not, then you're in a nihilistic state.

There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.