Top 100 Irving Stone Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.”

— Irving Stone

Featured in: Dedication Quotes

2. “There’s no love without pain.”

— Irving Stone

3. “How difficult it is to be simple.”

— Irving Stone

4. “There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”

— Irving Stone

5. “Everyone has their own personality, its own character, and if he respects that, everything would finally fall over for good only.”

— Irving Stone

6. “Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.”

— Irving Stone

7. “From out of pain, beauty.”

— Irving Stone

8. “Life’s not so bad after all. There are not only poison but also antidotes.”

— Irving Stone

9. “No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him.”

— Irving Stone

10. “When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears – I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer’s block.”

— Irving Stone

11. “Every human life had its pattern that had to be worked out slowly to its ultimate conclusion.”

— Irving Stone

12. “No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.”

— Irving Stone

13. “Normal people do not create art.”

— Irving Stone

14. “One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.”

— Irving Stone

15. “The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.”

— Irving Stone

Featured in: Romance Quotes

16. “God did not create us to abandon us.”

— Irving Stone

17. “An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.”

— Irving Stone

18. “The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.”

— Irving Stone

19. “Morality is similar to religion – it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.”

— Irving Stone

20. “But we artists have to be selfish you know, after all, with each painting, we die a little.”

— Irving Stone

21. “You cannot be firmly certain about anything. You can only have enough courage and strength to do what you consider to be right. Maybe it turns out that was wrong, but still you would have done his, and it is most important.”

— Irving Stone

22. “The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.”

— Irving Stone

23. “To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.”

— Irving Stone

24. “Pleasure is one of the most important things in life, as important as food or drink.”

— Irving Stone

25. “Story writers say that love is concerned only with young people, and the excitement and glamour of romance end at the altar. How blind they are. The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.”

— Irving Stone

26. “Art’s a staple. Like bread or wine or a warm coat in winter. Those who think it is a luxury have only a fragment of a mind. Man’s spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.”

— Irving Stone

27. “There are neither good nor evil, only the existence and action.”

— Irving Stone

28. “His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody’s lap.”

— Irving Stone

29. “Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.”

— Irving Stone

30. “Man’s spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food...”

— Irving Stone

31. “After all, the world is still great.”

— Irving Stone

32. “When I compare myself to the other fellows there is something stiff and awkward about me; I look as if I had been in prison for ten years.”

— Irving Stone

33. “You can only have the courage and strength to do what you think is right. It may turn out to be wrong, but you will at least have done it, and that is the important thing. We must act according to the best dictates of our reason, and then leave God to judge its ultimate value.”

— Irving Stone

34. “Many times in your life you may think you are failing, but ultimately you will express yourself and that expression will justify your life.”

— Irving Stone

35. “Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-it-ness.”

— Irving Stone

36. “From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud’s fiance after he teased her for being sweet, “Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.”

— Irving Stone

37. “If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itelf with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries.”

— Irving Stone

38. “I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I’m writing about.”

— Irving Stone

39. “Inside yourself you’re strong. That’s the place where strength counts. Strength shows not only in how fast you can chop down trees.’ -p. 5.”

— Irving Stone

40. “I was thinking that Rembrandt would have like to paint you.”

— Irving Stone

Featured in: Romance Quotes

41. “I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn’t I would never write anything else.”

— Irving Stone

42. “The desire to succeed had left Vincent. He worked because he had to, because it kept him from suffering too much mentally, because it distracted his mind. He could do without a wife, a home, and children; he could do without love and friendship and health; he could do without security, comfort, and food; he could even do without God. But he could not do without something which was greater than himself, which was his life – the power and ability to create.”

— Irving Stone

43. “Religion will never show the way.”

— Irving Stone

44. “Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.”

— Irving Stone

45. “He had come into the autumn of his life: a man had his seasons, even as had the earth. Was the harvesting of autumn less important than the seeding of spring? Each without the other was meaningless.”

— Irving Stone

46. “Art is amoral; so is life.”

— Irving Stone

47. “All artists are crackpots. And it’s their finest feature.”

— Irving Stone

48. “Time has a texture. Each period of waiting looms its own design. For Abigail, this one was shot through with golden threads. -Those Who Love, p. 130.”

— Irving Stone

49. “To be an artist is first to be a manual laborer.”

— Irving Stone

50. “He made his colours, built his stretchers, plastered his canvas, painted his pictures, carpentered his frames, and painted them. ‘Too bad I can’t buy my own pictures,’ he murmured aloud. ‘Then I’d be completely self-sufficient.’”

— Irving Stone