Quotes About Understanding

When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that.

Understanding like the eye; whilst it makes us see and perceive all things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own subject.

Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.

It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.

A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.

To be silent is sometimes an art, yet not so great a one as certain people would have us believe, who are wisest they are most silent.

No one blames themselves if they don't understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or "real" art; they simply think it's a bad cartoon.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

If thy words are wise, they will not seem so to the foolish: if they are deep the shallow will not appreciate them. Think not highly of thyself, then, when thou art praised by many.

[M]ere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.

All our knowledge is symbolic.

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.