Art Quotes - Page 28

God is beautiful. His beauty demands a response that is shaped that beauty, and that is art.

As regards the artists themselves, most of them gave up their freedom quite lightly, placing their art at the service of someone or something. As a rule, their concerns and their ambitions are those of any old careerist. I thus acquired a total distrust of art and artists, whether they were officially recognised or were endeavouring to become so, and I felt that I had nothing in common with this guild. I had a point of reference which held me elsewhere, namely that magic within art which I had encountered as a child.

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.

The day when on the cover of my books, my name will appear in bigger fond than the title of my book- I will stop writing because that would be the death of the writer in me.

Some of the people who hate me love some of the sentences that I have written, until they get to the name of the person to whom the sentences are attributed.

Who says that art and science cannot coincide? Art is seen as subjective, and science is seen as objective. Paintings, drawings, and sculptures can contain geometric patterns. Most anything you can mix in a beaker or a Petri dish could be displayed as art. The point is that there is art in science, and there is science in art.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior.

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

I want constructive energy generated by every brushstroke and between every line.

Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.

Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.

He who wars against the arts, wars not against nations, but against all mankind.

Art is magic, and art is powerful. Art saves lives- I really believe that. It gives us courage and compassion we might not have on our own.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

Nothing seems to me more tragic than the pressures we put on artists to do what we think we'll like, and our refusal to prize what is most ornery and special about them.

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

We tend to think that what matters is decided by society or culture or religion or our peers, but no one can say what truly matters except us.

I will admit that we as young rebels always wanted fundamentalists to understand our take on their religion, but rarely, if ever, the other way around. The fundamentalists are the real artists. If you saw only a masterpiece of an original painting and someone threw a splash of red across it saying that their version is better, you would be offended too.

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.

A day is too precious a treasure to forfeit.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.

I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretense that things are real, due to one's longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension of art - and then I had a glimpse of how religion can really cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful.tI found myself saying: 'Sacrifice is the secret - you have to sacrifice things for art and it's the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.' Then I got confused and I couldn't hold on to what I meant - until Miss Blossom remarked: 'Nonsense, duckie - it's prefectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it's a lovely rest.'I saw that, all right. Then I thought: 'But that's how Miss Marcy cured her sorrow, too - only she lost herself in other people instead of in religion.' Which way of life was best - hers or the Vicar's? I decided that he loves God and merely likes the villagers, whereas she loves the villagers and merely likes God - and then I suddenly wondered if I could combine both ways, love God and my neighbor equally. Was I really willing to?

She was rare, few and far betweenShe suspected he would be as wellAnd the thought of two rare, few and far between individualsDoing all that was necessary for that rare, few and far between Meeting to occurDrove her to write

...What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.

Do whatever you do intensely.

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.This is surely the death of all thought.This quote is taken from "The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7.

No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.

There are few better ways to get to know how a species thinks than to learn their art.

A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration—poetry, novels, music, dancing—if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.

This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he's surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand.

Why do people go to church on Sundays? A question that is very complicated because I know what the answer is supposed to be but I do not really know the answer.. I think people go because it is a kind of tradition. I think some goes because someone told them if tgey do not they might go to hell. Maybe some go to look for a wife or husband ☺. Maybe some go to church to display their latest designer shoes or handbags. Some goes just to please their Pastor. Some people go to church because they love the music or the preaching. Some goes because of some social reasons and friendship. Some have it in their mind that they will experience the presence of God in the church. Some goes to church because of miracle. Some goes to church when they are expecting something maybe child, comfort, marriage, work etc.. Some felt it is an obligation to give God a day out of the seven days he createdLet me tell you that church is not there to entertain you, Ephesians 3:20... there are things going on in the church that some people barely know about.Ask yourself today why do I go to church. I am sure a sincere answer will help you.

A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.

In paintings, music, poetry, architecture, we feel the elusive energy that moves through us and the air and the ground all the time, that usually disperses and turns chaotic in our busy-ness and distractedness and moodiness. Artists channel it, corral it, make it visible to the rest of us. The best works of art are like semaphores of our experience, signaling what we didn't know was true but do now.

An artist's job is to make new clichés.

Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love.

Dancing is to music what a beloved wife is to her husband. Both of them are so in love, you can't separate them.

The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action.

Happiness is what matters, feeling alive-not art or knowledge or money.

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

ERRORS ARE WHAT MAKE US HUMAN. PLOT TWIST: I'M A HORSE.

Culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dor beetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window.[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train.]

An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.

Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

The painting has a life of its own

You look like a lesbian artist fairy.

I celebrate myself, I paint and dance and sing myself, and what I assume you will assume, for every atom as of me as good belongs to dreamy You. I am a song. I am a poem. I am the soil and a gem. I am a stargate and a voyage. I am the ocean and your soul.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

If you can't focus then how do you expect to make your dreams come true?

The object of art is to give life a shape.

As a mother you have thoughts. You get interrupted. You forget.You are distracted. Your thoughts and ideas become fragmented,diluted, or simply evaporate. You must have faith that you willagain have a thought. Creativity is the string uponwhich you hang the pearls of your identity,your authentic presence.—Suzi Banks Baum

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

When I call on God, I am not trying to get his attention and I am not trying to get Him to notice me. In all this my journey with Him two questions usually comes to my mind, they are; am I paying attention to him or am I trying to get his attention?

Craft can be practiced by anyone, regardless of the skill or artistry that has come to be demanded by those who preach craft. Like a good meal, a good Crafternoon shouldn't need much - a few quality ingredients, a couple of good friends, and a little bit of creativity.

All my pains has always increased my sense of purpose.

He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession. I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his debauchery. When he had regained command over himself, he shuddered at the sight of the woman he had enjoyed. His thoughts floated then serenely in the empyrean, and he felt towards her the horror that perhaps the painted butterfly, hovering about the flowers, feels to the filthy chrysalis from which it has triumphantly emerged. I suppose that art is a manifestation of the sexual instinct. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the Entombment of Titian. It is possible that Strickland hated the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation.