Quotes on Art

Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?

The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

There have been times when I'm writing about things that are personally embarrassing. Like any human being, sometimes I can't help but wonder - 'What are the people I know going to think about this?' So I have to remind myself that all is permissible. Art has to be a free space. Language has to be a free space.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

I just don't think that the differences you make by donating to a museum or an art gallery really compare to the differences you make by donating to the charities that fight global poverty.

All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.

You may choose your words like a connoisseur, _x000D_ And polish it up with art, _x000D_ But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, _x000D_ Is the word that comes from the heart.

Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

Love me sweet With all thou art Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the Lightest part, Love me in full Being.

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

Sound has spoiled the most ancient of the world's arts, the art of pantomime, and has canceled out the great beauty that is silence.

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise and thou art happy.