Quotes on Art

We don't need to be taught to make art, but sometimes we need permission to do so. Following instructions is overrated.

Much of our lives involves the word “no.” In school we are mostly told, “Don't do it this way. Do it that way.” But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.

I think bridges have a special meaning in our life. I think a book is a bridge. Any type of art is a bridge that allows different cultures to connect. You may not understand your neighbour's way of seeing life, but you sure understand your neighbour's joy in painting or dancing.

O good old man, how well in thee appears The constant service of the antique world, When service sweat for duty, not for meed! Thou art not for the fashion of these times, Where none will sweat but for promotion, And having that do choke their service up Even with the having. . . .

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives

You can't make love without art.

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them

I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.

Effort and pain may not be avoided. Physical and psychological breakdowns occur. The support of a like-minded group, dedicated to The Art of Suffering, provides a safety net. An individual will push harder and risk more in the company of trustworthy peers.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.

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

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. Although the spirit be not master of that which it creates through music, yet it is blessed in this creation, which, like every creation of art, is mightier than the artist.

One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say.

You don't make art after you become an artist. You become an artist by ceaselessly making art.

All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.

But what is art other than revealing human nature?