All Quotes By Tag: Art

“Every form of art is another way of seeing the world. Another perspective, another window. And science –that’s the most spectacular window of all. You can see the entire universe from there.”

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

“[from Some words about ‘War and Peace’]For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man’s relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.[…]The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. An historian in describing a battle says: ‘The left flank of such and such an army was advanced to attack such and such a village and drove out the enemy, but was compelled to retire; then the cavalry, which was sent to attack, overthrew…’ and so on. But these words have no meaning for the artist and do not actually touch on the event itself. Either from his own experience, or from the letters, memoirs, and accounts, the artist realizes a certain event to himself, and very often (to take the example of a battle) the deductions the historian permits himself to make as to the activity of such and such armies prove to be the very opposite of the artist’s deductions. The difference of the results arrived at is also to be explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and the commander-in-chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles, and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame and death.”

“The first duty of an Author is — I conceive — a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities.— Charlotte Bronte”

“This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It’s not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he’s surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand.”

“In 1881, being on a visit to Boston, my wife and I found ourselves in the Parker House with the Ingersoll’s, and went over to Charleston to hear him lecture. His subject was ‘Some Mistakes of Moses,’ and it was a memorable experience. Our lost leaders, — Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, — who had really spoken to disciples rather than to the nation, seemed to have contributed something to form this organ by which their voice could reach the people. Every variety of power was in this orator, — logic and poetry, humor and imagination, simplicity and dramatic art, moral and boundless sympathy. The wonderful power which Washington’s Attorney-general, Edmund Randolph, ascribed to Thomas Paine of insinuating his ideas equally into learned and unlearned had passed from Paine’s pen to Ingersoll’s tongue. The effect on the people was indescribable. The large theatre was crowded from pit to dome. The people were carried from plaudits of his argument to loud laughter at his humorous sentences, and his flexible voice carried the sympathies of the assembly with it, at times moving them to tears by his pathos.{Conway’s thoughts on the great Robert Ingersoll}”

“Your personal truth is your gift to the world.”

“Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.”

“This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.”

“Art does not exist only to entertain — but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for the truth.”

“True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.”

“I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.”

“Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.”

“I could watch him do this until morning — never asking questions and never interrupting his work. I worship quietly — his intense focus and attention to detail and then, out of no where, I realize the inconvenient, inappropriate truth: ‘I love this man… and it has swallowed me.”

“Cheers to all the Rebels out there who care way too much about Art and Truth and Magic to fall in line with the mundane task of fitting in.”