Quotes About Art

There are two gifts which every man of images needs to be a true creator: a certain sensitivity to life, to living things, and at the same time, the art which will enable him to capture that life in a certain specific way. I'm not talking about a pure aesthetics...

The absurdity of opera lies in the fact that rational elements are used and three-dimensional reality is aimed at while at the same time everything is neutralized by the music.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope.

I think the dilemma exists because art, among all the other tidy categories, most closely resembles what it is like to be human. To be alive. It is our nature to be imperfect. To have uncategorized feelings and emotions. To make or do things that don't sometimes necessarily make sense.

Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope. Only art can take the holler of a returning soldier and turn it into a shared expression and a deep, collective experience. Music, like all art, gives pain and our most wrenching emotions voice, language, and form, so it can be recognized and shared. The magic of the high lonesome sound is the magic of all art: the ability

Music, like all art, gives pain and our most wrenching emotions voice, language, and form, so it can be recognized and shared. The magic of the high lonesome sound is the magic of all art: the ability to both capture our pain and deliver us from it at the same time.

If you're wondering what happens if you attach your self-worth to your art or your product and people love it, let me answer that from personal and professional experience. You're in even deeper trouble. Everything shame needs to hijack and control your life is in place. You've handed over your self-worth to what people think.

So, what does a gratitude practice look like? The folks I interviewed talked about keeping gratitude journals, doing daily gratitude meditations or prayers, creating gratitude art, and even stopping during their stressful, busy days to actually say these words out loud: "I am grateful for …

When we hear someone else sing about the jagged edges of heartache or the unspeakable nature of grief, we immediately know we're not the only ones in pain. The transformative power of art is in this sharing.

We feel admiration when someone's abilities, accomplishments, or character inspires us, or when we see something else that inspires us, like art or nature. Interestingly, admiration often leads to us wanting to improve ourselves. It doesn't, however, make us want to be like the person or thing we admire—we just want to be better versions of ourselves.

We feel admiration when someone's abilities, accomplishments, or character inspires us, or when we see something else that inspires us, like art or nature. Interestingly, admiration often leads to us wanting to improve ourselves.

Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience and transform despair into hope. Only art can take the holler of a returning soldier and turn it into a shared expression and a deep collective experience. Music, like all art, gives pain in our most wrenching emotions voice, language and form so it can be recognized and shared.

What is so frightening about [writing]? I still don't know. Perhaps it's the horrible knowledge that no matter how well you write, the resultant product will never correlate exactly to the truth, will never arrive with quite the melodious voice you hear in the acoustic cavity of your mind.

If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us .

writing is not a performance but a generosity.

no writing is a waste of time--no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.

They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer— some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky— are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one's life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.

Well, van Gogh was one of the great painters. During his life he made only 109 dollars in all on his paintings. They are now worth about two million dollars. He had a terribly hard life—loneliness, poverty, and starvation that led to insanity. And yet it was one of the greatest lives that was ever lived—the happiest, the most burningly incandescent

you will never know what your husband looks like unless you try to draw him, and you will never understand him unless you try to write his story.

Now this creative power I think is the Holy Ghost. My theology may not be very accurate, but that is how I think of it. I know that William Blake called this creative power the Imagination, and he said it was God.

Now Blake thought that this creative power should be kept alive in all people for all of their lives. And so do I. Why? Because it is life itself. It is the Spirit. In fact it is the only important thing about us. The rest of us is legs and stomach, materialistic cravings and fears.

It is our nasty twentieth-century materialism that makes us feel: what is the use of writing, painting, etc., unless one has an audience or gets cash for it? Socrates and the men of the Renaissance did so much because the rewards were intrinsic, i.e., the enlargement of the soul.

I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.