Quotes about mood

„If a painting has a soulful effect on the viewer, if it puts his mind into a soulful mood, then it has fulfilled the first requirement of a work of art. However bad it might be in drawing, color, handling, etc.“

—  Caspar David Friedrich Swedish painter 1774 - 1840

Quote of Friedrich's letter 8 Feb. 1809, to 'Akademiedirektor Schulz'; as cited by Helmut Bôrsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jàhnig in Caspar David Friedrich: Gemâlde, Druckgraphik und bildmassige Zeichnungen (Munich: Prestel, 1973), 182-83, esp. 183; translation, David Britt - note 117 http://d2aohiyo3d3idm.cloudfront.net/publications/virtuallibrary/0892366745.pdf
1794 - 1840

„A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.“

—  Stanley Kubrick American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor 1928 - 1999

„I’m not mad. I’m in a perfectly happy mood, you asshole.“

—  Kurt Cobain American musician and artist 1967 - 1994

„In contrast to the flux and muddle of life, art is clarity and enduring presence. In the stream of life, few things are perceived clearly because few things stay put. Every mood or emotion is mixed or diluted by contrary and extraneous elements. The clarity of art—the precise evocation of mood in the novel, or of summer twilight in a painting—is like waking to a bright landscape after a long fitful slumber, or the fragrance of chicken soup after a week of head cold.“

—  Yi-Fu Tuan Chinese-American geographer 1930

Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture, ch. 10 (1993).

„I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, a child humanized or de-humanized.“

—  Haim Ginott psychologist 1922 - 1973

Quoted in Fair isn't always equal: assessing & grading in the differentiated classroom By Rick Wormeli, p. 9

„The point is that one sees things at different moments with different eyes. Differently in the morning then in the evening. The way in which one sees also depends on one's mood…. coming in from a dark bedroom in the morning into the sitting room one will, for example, see everything in a bluish light. Even the deepest shadows are topped with bright light. After a while one will accustom oneself to the light and the shadows will be deeper and everything will be seen more sharply. If an atmosphere of this kind is being painted it won't do merely to sit and gaze at everything 'just as one sees'. One must paint precisely the fleeting moment of significance – one must capture the exact experience separating that significant moment from the next – the exact moment when the motif struck one… In some circumstances a chair may seem to be just as interesting as a human being. In some way or another it must have caught the interest in which case the onlooker's interest must somehow be engaged in the same way. It's not the chair that should be painted, but what the person has felt at the sight of it [written in Saint Cloud, 1890 - probably related to the chair of Vincent van Gogh“

—  Edvard Munch Norwegian painter and printmaker 1863 - 1944

Quote of Munch from: T 2770, (1890); as cited in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 83-84
1880 - 1895

„I have mood poisoning. Must be something I hate.“

—  Marilyn Manson American rock musician and actor 1969

„I don't get this fashion for happy funerals. He said he wanted all his mates to be in a good mood and smile, and this is a very fashionable idea, that when you die, it's supposed to be a celebration and joyous and everyone laughing, but I want people's lives torn apart when I go. I want to be embalmed and brought out when we have guests.“

—  Jeremy Hardy British comedian 1961 - 2019

The News Quiz, BBC Radio 4, October 1998 (rebroadcast on BBC 7, 13 June 2006)

„Some of you will be successful, and such will need but little philosophy to take them home in cheerful spirits; others will be disappointed, and will be in a less happy mood. To such, let it be said, “Lay it not too much to heart.” Let them adopt the maxim, “Better luck next time”; and then, by renewed exertion, make that better luck for themselves.“

—  Abraham Lincoln 16th President of the United States 1809 - 1865

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

„The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts.“

—  Marcus Aurelius, book Meditations

Source: Meditations

„Considering the current mood in the United States, it should be compulsory reading for every American who thinks the Taliban and Al-Qaeda represent the totality of Muslim life.“

—  J.M. DeMatteis comics illustrator 1953

"Summer Reading" (9 September 2010) http://www.jmdematteis.com/2010/09/theres-something-about-summerthe.html
Context: I seriously considered putting Nine Lives aside (I no longer feel compelled, as I did when I was younger, to finish every book I start). I’m happy I stuck with it: as I continued reading, the lives chronicled — in clear, compassionate prose — became more and more fascinating, and, on occasion, heartbreaking: The collision between ancient and modern culture in India threatens to wipe away traditions that have gone on, uninterrupted, for thousands of years and most of Dalrymple’s seekers struggle with that knowledge in some way. There’s a lovely chapter about a Sufi devotee in southern Pakistan — she’s known as the Red Fairy — that illuminates the lyrical, mystical side of Islam. Considering the current mood in the United States, it should be compulsory reading for every American who thinks the Taliban and Al-Qaeda represent the totality of Muslim life.

„Many people look at bitcoin as a means of enrichment, but for me it was not just an instrument of prosperity - it was the idea of ​​absolute freedom. I believed in this idea even when it was not relevant at all and Bitcoin did not become ten times more valuable in a year, simply because it corresponded to my ideal ideas about money. This event did not affect my mood, it was rather the opposite, the motivation to continue the path. But still, once again writing on the Internet that you have bitcoins is not worth it.“

—  Maxim Mernes Russian businessman, investor, blogger 1996

About libertarianism and blockchain
Source: Максим Мернес: "Нужно покупать ликвидную криптовалюту", Maxim Mernes, 2019T08:56, @Максим Мернес, ru, 2019-11-21 https://argumenti.ru/society/2018/12/595045,

„Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.“

—  Richard Wright, book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

„Casteist forces have been rejected in Gujarat, the people's mood is anti-casteist.“

—  Narendra Modi Prime Minister of India 1950

2002, Interview, 27 August 2002
Context: In Gujarat, the poison of casteism was injected in the name of the KHAM [Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis[, ] and Muslims] theory. Gujaratis rejected it and turned towards the unity of society. Casteist forces have been rejected in Gujarat, the people's mood is anti-casteist.

„… as a matter of fact it is nice to paint a happy picture after a sad one. I think there is a kind of loneliness in a lot of them which I don't think about as the fact that I'm lonely and therefore I paint lonely pictures, but I like kind of lonely things anyhow; so if the forms express that to me, there is a certain excitement that I have about that.... What I try to do is to create the painting so that the overall thing has the particular emotion; not just the forms in it.... in other words, there's a particular static or heavy form that can have a look to it, an experience that translated through the form; so then it does have a mood. And when that is there, well then it becomes it becomes a painting whereas all the other pictures that have far more interesting shapes and so on, don't become that to me.“

—  Franz Kline American painter 1910 - 1962

n.p.
1960's, Living Art, 1963

„When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.“

—  Percy Bysshe Shelley English Romantic poet 1792 - 1822

„My great pleasure is creation—of this I never tire. Some of my guests have complained of a gentle melancholy which hangs in the air; I agree that the mood exists. The explanation, I believe, arises from the fugacity of beauty, the tragic pavanne to which all of us step.“

—  Jack Vance, Demon Princes

Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Palace of Love (1967), Chapter 12 (p. 415)

„The border is a notion too. It’s a mood. It’s a culture…after living seven years on the border, and I really was speaking in two tongues—I was dual person back then…“

—  Tanya Saracho Mexican-American actress, playwright and showrunner

On living on the border and how it affected her life in “An Interview with Tanya Saracho” https://www.theintervalny.com/interviews/2014/10/an-interview-with-tanya-saracho/ in The Interval (2014 Oct 29)

„It is just as ridiculous to get excited & hysterical over a coming cultural change as to get excited & hysterical over one's physical aging... There is legitimate pathos about both processes; but blame & rebellion are essentially cheap, because inappropriate, emotions... It is wholly appropriate to feel a deep sadness at the coming of unknown things & the departure of those around which all our symbolic associations are entwined. All life is fundamentally & inextricably sad, with the perpetual snatching away of all the chance combinations of image & vista & mood that we become attached to, & the perpetual encroachment of the shadow of decay upon illusions of expansion & liberation which buoyed us up & spurred us on in youth. That is why I consider all jauntiness, & many forms of carelessly generalised humour, as essentially cheap & mocking, & occasionally ghastly & corpselike. Jauntiness & non-ironic humour in this world of basic & inescapable sadness are like the hysterical dances that a madman might execute on the grave of all his hopes. But if, at one extreme, intellectual poses of spurious happiness be cheap & disgusting; so at the other extreme are all gestures & fist-clenchings of rebellion equally silly & inappropriate—if not quite so overtly repulsive. All these things are ridiculous & contemptible because they are not legitimately applicable... The sole sensible way to face the cosmos & its essential sadness (an adumbration of true tragedy which no destruction of values can touch) is with manly resignation—eyes open to the real facts of perpetual frustration, & mind & sense alert to catch what little pleasure there is to be caught during one's brief instant of existence. Once we know, as a matter of course, how nature inescapably sets our freedom-adventure-expansion desires, & our symbol-&-experience-affections, definitely beyond all zones of possible fulfilment, we are in a sense fortified in advance, & able to endure the ordeal of consciousness with considerable equanimity... Life, if well filled with distracting images & activities favourable to the ego's sense of expansion, freedom, & adventurous expectancy, can be very far from gloomy—& the best way to achieve this condition is to get rid of the unnatural conceptions which make conscious evils out of impersonal and inevitable limitations... get rid of these, & of those false & unattainable standards which breed misery & mockery through their beckoning emptiness.“

—  H.P. Lovecraft American author 1890 - 1937

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 291
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long