Top 100 Irving Stone Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Fortune is beastly – it is only suitable for cows and businessmen.”

— Irving Stone

52. “Because it will make a real artist of you. The more you suffer, the more grateful you ought to be. An empty stomach is better than a full one, Van Gogh, and a broken heart is better than happiness. Never forget that!”

— Irving Stone

53. “They had painted in a grand rush to keep intact the purity of their first impression, the mood in which the motif had been conceived.”

— Irving Stone

54. “Do you know the anecdote about Rubens? He was serving Holland as Ambassador to Spain and used to spend the afternoon in the royal gardens before his easel. One day a jaunty member of the Spanish Court passed and remarked, ‘I see that the diplomat amuses himself sometimes with painting,’ to which Rubens replied, ‘No, the painter amuses himself sometimes with diplomacy!”

— Irving Stone

55. “Immortality means being loved by many anonymous people.”

— Irving Stone

56. “Who loves – lives, who lives – works, and who works has some bread.”

— Irving Stone

57. “Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people’s successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.”

— Irving Stone

58. “How can a young person learn whether he chose the correct way? He thinks he has a special idea, and then he discovers that he is completely inappropriate for it.”

— Irving Stone

59. “Guilty, Your Honor, but only of minor transgressions. My motto is, ‘Let no girl, no gun, no cards, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness keep you from your books.”

— Irving Stone

60. “Pain did curious things to him. It made him sensitive to the pain of others.”

— Irving Stone

61. “Sometimes I think that just as trains and carriages are means of locomotion to get us from one place to another on this earth, so typhoid and consumption are means of locomotion to get us from one world to another.”

— Irving Stone

62. “The artist has the liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours.”

— Irving Stone

63. “He was spilling out a year of his life blood with every convulsive painting that he tore from his vitals. It was not the length of his stay on earth that mattered to him ; it was what he did with the days of his life. For him time would have to be measured by the paintings he poured out, not by the fluttering leaves of a calendar.”

— Irving Stone

64. “The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas.”

— Irving Stone

65. “Her gown was cut Sufficiently low to suggest how abundantly the coming generations might be nourished.”

— Irving Stone

66. “What we know of others is our personal secret.”

— Irving Stone

67. “I do like to teach. Sitting in my great chair at school, I used to consider myself as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth... To fire a newborn soul with ardor for learning! At that time I thought the world could afford no greater pleasure.’ – Those Who Love, p. 177.”

— Irving Stone

68. “Sometimes men are generous and forgiving, sometimes angry and blind.”

— Irving Stone

69. “The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.”

— Irving Stone

70. “Art destroys the life.”

— Irving Stone

71. “There seemed to be that same fierce quest after truth, the same unafraid penetration, the same feeling that character is beauty, no matter how sordid it may appear.”

— Irving Stone

72. “He felt extremely friendly to them all; they too knew what splendid thing it was to be in love.”

— Irving Stone

73. “I have to make my drawing right so that my drawing will be right.”

— Irving Stone

74. “He was a victim of his own integrity, which forced him to do his best, even when he would have preferred to do nothing at all.”

— Irving Stone

75. “There is only a God-given number of years in which to work and fulfill yourself. Don’t squander them.”

— Irving Stone

76. “Crime was not a cause, but a result; the prisons were the open sores of a diseased social body.”

— Irving Stone

77. “These workers,” said Mendes with a gentle sweep of his arm, “have a hard life of it. When illness comes they have no money for a doctor. The food for tomorrow comes from today’s labour, and hard labour it is, too. Their houses, as you see, are small and poor; they are never more than a stone’s throw away from privation and want. They’ve made a bad bargain with life; they need the thought of God to comfort them.”

— Irving Stone

78. “It was only a remote portion of his mind that heard and answered the girl. The rest of him was soaking up her beauty with the passionate thirst of a man who has drunk too long at a celibate well.”

— Irving Stone

79. “Do you call yourself an artist?” “Yes.” “How absurd. You never sold a picture in your life.” “Is that what being an artist means – selling? I thought it meant one who was always seeking without absolutely finding. I thought it means the contrary from ‘I know it, I have found it.’ When I say I am an artist, I only mean.”

— Irving Stone

80. “Alla guerra di amor vince chi fugge.”

— Irving Stone

81. “Do not call yourself old. A man is as old as the creative force within him.”

— Irving Stone

82. “Misery is the only thing in the world that has no end or edge.”

— Irving Stone

83. “Reading is a stout-hearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-it-ness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home run, a slam-dunk, or breaking the four-minute mile.”

— Irving Stone

84. “Being mad is even pleasant. But only a madman understands that.”

— Irving Stone

85. “An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.”

— Irving Stone

86. “The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.”

— Irving Stone

87. “As he reached the door of the chapel and turned back for a last look, he saw that the Virgin too was sad and lonely; the most alone human being God ever put on earth.”

— Irving Stone

88. “You are a grand nerveux, Vincent,” Doctor Rey had told him. “You never have been normal. But then, no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.”

— Irving Stone

89. “Vincent took them in the full spirit of friendship which knows that the difference between giving and taking is purely temporal.”

— Irving Stone

90. “Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only – he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.”

— Irving Stone

91. “I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.”

— Irving Stone

92. “Listen, my friend, all forms that exist in God’s universe can be found in the human figure. A man’s body and face can tell everything he represents. So how could I ever exhaust my interest in it?”

— Irving Stone

93. “Drawing is the poet’s written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.”

— Irving Stone

94. “The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.”

— Irving Stone

95. “There is no thrill of mortal danger to surpass that of a lone man trying to create something that never existed before.”

— Irving Stone

96. “A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings.”

— Irving Stone

97. “He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.”

— Irving Stone

98. “The simplest things that need self-restraint are the most difficult to replicate.”

— Irving Stone

99. “Art has a magic quality: the more minds that digest it, the longer it lives.”

— Irving Stone

100. “A work of art meant growth from the particular to the universal. To a work of art, time brought timelessness.”

— Irving Stone