Quotes About Art

Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man's true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations.

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

You've influenced the world not because you wanted to hug it and cuddle it and call it sweet thing, but because one day you wanted to beat the crap out of somebody but you didn't. You made a painting instead.

Please do not strain yourself, Miss Doyle. I won't have my girls going cross-eyed in the name of art.

I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats.

But forgiveness...I'll hold on to that fragile slice of hope and keep it close, remembering that in each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice.

I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats. You are officially the most annoying unreal creature ever. Meet a lot of us, do you?

Pero el perdón...Me aferraré a esa frágil porción de esperanza y la mantendré cerca de mi, recordando que en cada uno de nosotros hay cosas buenas y malas, luz y oscuridad, arte y dolor, elecciones y lamentaciones.

But forgiveness... I'll hold on to that fragile slice of hop and keep it close, remembering that in all of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We're all our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion, fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We've got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there's an awful lot of gray to work with. no one can live in the light all the time.

the canvas had disfigured it. Koko squirmed and squealed and made himself

son favored abstract expressionism.

A poem wasn't really a poem, it seemed to her, unless it was full of metaphor; it took her a while to adjust to the prosody she heard in his work.

writing is magic because it harnesses the energy generated by the chaos within.

while America, for its part, proved singularly unreceptive to the socialist-realist principle that undergirds them all: the principle that art can, or even must, have a message; and that such art-with-a-message, which will always be dismissed as propaganda, is in fact the only available corrective to the real and actual propaganda of entrenched official power.

History is the art of giving meaning to the meaningless," said a brilliant German professor (who was later killed by the Nazis).

That gesture was intended as, in itself, a political act. And the editors were not simply proposing that modernist art and literature could be appreciated regardless of one's politics; they were committed to explaining why an appreciation for modernism was consistent with political progressivism.

Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. The greatest playwrights are moralists.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.

Whenever society gets too stifling and the rules too complex, there's some sort of musical explosion.

Art thrives on society and society thrives on its art.