It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do that makes life blessed.             ––Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.      ––Leonard Cohen

Some people want to achieve immortality through their work or their descendants. I intend to achieve immortality by not dying.

                                                                                          ––Woody Allen

Any form of art is a form of power, it has impact, it can affect change –– it cannot only move us, it makes us move.

                                                                                           ––Ossie Davis

[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation –– and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity –– the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.                                            ––Joseph Conrad

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.                                                                       –Madelein L’Engle

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.         –Albert Camus

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

––Duke Ellington

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

––Frank Zappa

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.            ––John F. Kennedy

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.              ––Orson Welles

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations for inclusion here. They may be sent to Gleanings, c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Road, Newtown, CT 06470 or emailed to editor@thebee.com.)