Esther Mahlangu Quotes

Real artists ship.

Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.

[Belafonte]'d take me to perform for Martin Luther King's cause. But when they were marching I did not take part, because I was not a citizen

[W]hen the President's visitors came to Guinea, we were all called on to go and entertain them. I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists. Even in South Africa today we are not nurtured like that.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.

It's you who invokes the rain in the town. But the rain doesn't soak my soul. My soul's for you... ...and deep down there... ...celebrations all around! When I behold you... ...it seems your body's made up of the soft rose petals! Your lips... ...are they the same artist as they had once been?

God can do anything. He has all power in the palm of His Hand. My Body, like all other bodies, is a temporary habitation; but, My Power is eternal, all-pervasive, ever-dominant.

I, without grasping will pass beyond sorrow,
And I will attain nirvāṇa," one says.
Whoever grasps like this
Has great grasping.

It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.

From your place of darkness observe the defects of others. See but do not appear to see; listen but do not seem to listen; know but do not let it be known that you know. When you perceive the trend of a man's words, do not change them, do not correct them, but examine them and compare them with the results.

If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Wherever physicists look, they see examples of fine tuning.

But African languages refused to die. They would not simply go to the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify, and argue about the international conferences.

[Bai Juyi] utilized Confucianism to order his conduct, utilized Buddhism to cleanse his mind, and then utilized history, paintings, mountains, rivers, wine, music and song to soothe his spirit.