Top 1200 Cave Paintings Quotes & Sayings

One extremely important purpose of emotions from an evolutionary perspective is to help us decide what to remember and what to forget. The cavewoman who could remember which cave had the gentle guy who gave her food is more likely to be our foremother than the cave woman who confused it with the cave that held the killer bear. The emotion of love (or something resembling it) and the emotion of fear would help secure her memories.

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

You don't need a uniform color: We used a mixture of brick red, browns and grays, and then threw in seashells, branches and various types of rock, so our walls ended up looking like cave paintings!

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

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.

Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.

You know,” he said, “I wish you could see this cave.” “What’s it like?” He paused. “It’s...beautiful, really.” “Tell me.” And so Po described to Katsa what hid in the blackness of the cave; and outside, the world awaited them.

The spot paintings and spin paintings were trying to find mechanical ways to make paintings.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

Van Gogh was asked how he created such beautiful paintings. He said I dream my paintings and then I paint my dreams.

Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave know best. Although I wear a lot of jeans, I've been told that Nick Cave doesn't own a pair and wouldn't be caught dead in denim.

I think that there are many aspects to the relationship between humans and animals. But briefly, humans appear to have always been fascinated by them from the time of cave paintings and before.

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.

Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

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.

What's in the cave, Russell?' Madigan asked with heavy sarcasm. I shrugged. 'Rocks. Lots of 'em.' 'Don't patronize me.' His voice lowered to a hiss. 'What else is in the cave?' I looked him straight in the eye and spoke one word. 'Mud.

The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.

I'm so not macho. It's crazy. My man cave is so not a man cave.

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us.

For me, I think [art] exists in a cave. I am in a cave. I have my own editing place, but I'm not powerful enough to amass the resources to keep doing movies every two or three years.

I don't really know what's going to happen 10,000 years from now. We've been biologically modern for, what, almost 200,000 years? Let's go back to the cave paintings: I think the moment that someone landed a charcoal on a wall to describe reality, that's language already - that happened on a vertical surface, which, even though they didn't build it, somehow we could understand it as architecture because there's a cavity that separates the inside and outside. That's 40,000 years in the past.

Tribe cats are named after the first thing their mother sees, but I thing this would lead to a lot of kits being named 'wall of cave', 'side of cave' and 'floor of cave

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.

All art, from the paintings on the walls of cave dwellers to art created today, is autobiographical because it comes from the secret place in the soul where imagination resides.

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.

What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?

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.

I wanted to find a cave and hang out there for the rest of my life and be a cave painter and eat dirt.

In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.

I think that people tend to look at the paintings as being resolved or finite. But, to me, a painting can be an index for all of the paintings I've done and all of the paintings I'm going to do. It's like if I'm doing a film of the Olympics, I'm not examining a specific sport; I'm interested in the overall context.

People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That's something that's part of us.

The flesh-eating cockroaches and venomous centipedes in the Gomantong cave in Borneo were pretty unsavoury. They turn the floor of the cave, which is itself the world's largest pile of bird and bat poo, into a seething mass of invertebrate horror!

I enjoy thinking about how paintings can change depending on where they are - how they look in a gallery or in relation to other paintings, or in different rooms. Paintings can change the way we experience and see the world.

Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.

A New York audience generally likes decorative paintings, and decorative paintings go with the couch. If you change the couch, you change the painting. And when you're coming up, and the paintings aren't first-class decoration, you're at a disadvantage for publicity and sales.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

In winter there is no heat, no light, no noon, evening touches morning, there is fog, and mist, the window is frosted, and you cannot see clearly. The sky is but the mouth of a cave. The whole day is the cave.... Frightful season! Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.

I want to make beautiful paintings. But I don't make beautiful paintings by putting beautiful paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn't work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising.

I believe that 100, 200, 300 years from now, all these paintings will be around because they're the first paintings of humans doing things off this Earth.

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.

Some people might think that the paintings are involved with a mythic - not just subject matter - but a certain sort of physical space that the paintings occupy...like personages.

Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.

It's productive and fun to try interpreting cave paintings, but ultimately, they can't teach us anything beyond what we imagine them to be.

Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.

Honestly, the essence of publishing hasn't changed. Since the days of the cave man carving stuff on the cave walls, people have wanted stories, and storytellers have wanted an audience. That is still the case. The changes are really a matter of format.

As an artist, and for me personally, my biggest fear is categorization. I hate the idea that I would become someone who says that "this is what I do and now that's what I am." What I really feel like is an explorer. I want to continue exploring my brain cave and see what's there, you know? And I don't want to just stay in one cave.

Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.

I read 'The Crystal Cave' book by Mary Stewart, and I thought it was a really, really interesting part of the legend, in which Merlin could enter into the cave with these crystals and see reflections of the future in them and learn how to use that and harness those powers for himself.

They found a cave once lived in by Osama bin Laden and the only thing in the cave were some boxer undershorts, and macaroni. I'm telling you, you add an old stack of Playboys, this could be my place. It's like I have a twin.

Omygod, I haven’t got years. I’ll have to hide in the Bat Cave.” “Once you go to the Bat Cave it’s forever, babe.” Eeek.

I don't paint over my paintings with black paint. I paint black paintings. It isn't because I'm sad, just as I didn't paint red paintings yesterday because I was happy. Nor will I paint yellow paintings tomorrow because I'm jealous.

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.

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.

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.

I think the number one public-relations blunder Osama has made is that he lives in a cave-fortress and if there's one thing we've learned from it's that you can't trust a guy who lives in a cave-fortress -- Lex Luther, Captain Nemo, Dr. Evil. I'm telling you the list goes on.

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.

(At the back of the cave, Phoebe placed her hand against one of the stones where a spring release opened an elevator door. Chris gave an over exaggerated gape.) Holy Hand Grenade, Batman, it’s a bat cave. (Chris)