50 Cave Paintings Quotes

Following is our list of cave paintings quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

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Famous Cave Paintings Quotes

If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how people were depicted inside nature, not outside it. It was a kind of dream time. That's what I'm exploring. — Gregory Colbert

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic. — Keith Haring

Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh] — Irving Stone

If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age — Karel Appel

Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom. - Thomas Carlyle

Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom. — Thomas Carlyle

Sunlight is painting. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world. — Georges Bataille

Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable. — Lee Krasner

The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life. — Keith Haring

If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness! — Pablo Picasso

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves. - Barnett Newman

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves. — Barnett Newman

The art of creation is older than the art of killing. — Ed Koch

The art of creation is older than the art of killing. — Andrei Voznesensky

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. — Balthus

The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees — Mark Rothko

Cave Quotes

Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. — J. R. R. Tolkien

Let love lead your soul. Make it a place to retire to, a kind of monastery cave, a retreat for the deepest core of your being. — Farid al-Din Attar

What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done. — Temple Grandin

Cave paintings quote A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

Yet the love we experience through other people is just a shadow of the love of the inner self. There is a sublime place inside us where love dwells. The love that pulses in the cave of the heart does not depend on anything outside. It does not expect anything. It is completely independent. — Swami Muktananda

When life gives you lemons don't make lemonade, make pink lemonade. Be unique. - Wanda Sykes

When life gives you lemons don't make lemonade, make pink lemonade. Be unique. — Wanda Sykes

It's crazy that with an iPhone, a little Starlink antenna, and a solar power unit, you could live in an isolated cave in the mountains or on a raft in the middle of the Pacific and get a world-class education, start a business or art career, and make friends all around the world. — Tim Urban

Cave paintings quote The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek

That problem has been going on since men and women and their children moved from the plains and into caves. How many times have you heard Howard Cunningham talking to Marian about shopping? Too many. — Henry Winkler

Discussing religion was like discussing which cave will be better to live. If you want to follow a religion, follow any religion. It does not matter. If you have decided to commit suicide, does it matter how you do it? — Javed Akhtar

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends. — Orson Welles

Welcome out of the cave, my friend. It's a bit colder out here, but the stars are just beautiful. — Plato

People Writing About Cave Paintings

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Keith Haring

Keith Haring
quotes on art

35 452
Read quotes by Gregory Colbert

Gregory Colbert
quotes on art, photography and life

13 150
Read quotes by Irving Stone

Irving Stone
quotes on education, art and love

77 217
Read quotes by Karel Appel

Karel Appel
quotes on education, art and world

11 126
Read quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle
quotes on leadership, hazrat ali

823 4353
Read quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne
quotes on nature, love and family

283 1890

More Cave Paintings Quotes

Come into my lap and sit in the center of your soul. Drink the living waters of memory and give birth to yourself. What you unearth with stun you. You will paint the walls of this cave in thanksgiving. — Meinrad Craighead

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo. — Jerry Saltz

Cave paintings quote The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures
The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do.

In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange. — Werner Herzog

The definition of who's literate and who's not keeps changing. So, in Neanderthal times, if you painted on a cave wall, that was enough to transmit how you hunt, how you eat, how you cook, how you dress, and we can read about that. — Juan Enriquez

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner. — David Mitchell

Cave paintings quote I would like to paint the way a bird signs.
I would like to paint the way a bird signs.

Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. — Murray Gell-Mann

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing. — Toni Morrison

We're in the 'cave-painting' era of computer interfaces. — Anand Agarawala

If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, and a sign on it saying, "End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE TO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry. — Joel Garreau

Stories were primarily verbal to begin with. Before there were cave paintings, stories were told over generations. We tell each other thousands of stories in the course of everyday life. — David Massengill

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology. — Lewis Thomas

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry. — Terry Pratchett

I want the viewer to be overwhelmed. I want the space to feel like it is caving in on the viewer and that they are forcibly entering the world of my paintings. I want there to be a feeling of overpowering decadence to the work, that is almost too much to take. I don't want them to be subtle. — Rosson Crow

[My muse] likes to inhabit tea leaves, sunlight filtered through bamboo, melancholy clouds over the Devon coastline, a weedy railroad crossing in the Southern States, bubblegum pop from the sixties, torch songs from the forties, undersea caves where B-movie octopi grapple with men in loincloths, sacred groves of pink anime dryads, Victorian fairy paintings executed by gentlemen in lunatic asylums and so on. — Quentin S. Crisp

Human beings were human beings anatomically for several hundred thousand years, wandering around, hunting and gathering. And then suddenly, at the same time they started painting in caves they started multiplying. — Howard Rheingold

I've always loved black, and I realized that, from the beginning, man went into completely dark caves to paint. They painted with black too. They could have painted with white because there were white stones all over the ground, but no, they chose to paint with black in the dark. — Pierre Soulages

When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better. — Werner Herzog

Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs. — Werner Herzog

We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe. — Kevin Rudd

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. — Jacob Bronowski

A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting-all those oases of perfection that make up art-to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life. — Fernando Botero

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities. — Eric Hoffer

She didn't have words for what Levi was. He was a cave painting. He was The Red Ballon. She lifted her heels and pulled him forward until his face was so close, she could look at only one of his eyes at a time. "You're magic," she said. — Rainbow Rowell

I heard the car door shut and then Fabian's voice. "You won't believe what I found around the edge of your property," the ghost announced. "A cave with prehistoric painting inside it!" I rolled my eyes. That was the best tactic Fabian could come up with? This was a vampire he was trying to stall, not a paleontologist. — Jeaniene Frost

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