A Collection of Rebel Quotes

To inspire and amuse.

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“I wants to make your flesh creep.” - Charles Dickens

“And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you,
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” - T.S. Eliot

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.” - Jane Austen

“Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.” - W.H. Auden

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self.” - Cyril Connolly

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.” - Hannah Arendt

“A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” - Thomas Jefferson

“Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.” - Peter Shaffer

“The object of art is to give life a shape.” - Jean Anouilh

“Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.” - Vladimir Mayakovsky

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” - Oscar Wilde

“Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.” - Elizabeth Bowen

“Nature made him, and then broke the mold.” - Ludovico Ariosto

“Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel.” - Théophile Gautier

“The whole of art is an appeal to a reality which is not without us but in our minds.” - Desmond MacCarthy

“Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” - Samuel Butler

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” - Rudyard Kipling

“Words as is well known, are great foes of reality.” - Joseph Conrad

“A blow with the word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.” - Robert Burton

“My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.” - Arthur Scargill

“Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.” - Joseph Addison

“Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.” - Aldous Huxley

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.” - J.K. Rowling (Albus Dumbledore)

“If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.” - John Fitzgerald Kennedy

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.” - James Baldwin

“We are the music makers,
We are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by long sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams.” - Arthur O’Shaughnessy

“Artists don’t seek reasons. They are all by definition children, and vice versa.” - Ned Rorem