Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph EllisonRead
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Interpretation
Understanding art requires empathy and knowledge of human experiences.
Ralph Ellison suggests that appreciating art is not merely about technical skill or aesthetic preferences, but rather about one's ability to empathize with others and understand the intricacies of human life. Art is a reflection of humanity, and our engagement with it deepens as we expand our knowledge and compassion towards the diverse experiences of people.
In practice
This quote could be used in a lecture about the importance of empathy in art education.
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.
If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.
I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.
I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business so that's literally 70 years.
Here let dead poetry rise once more to life.
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