Joseph Campbell Quotes

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

For people to link my music to their lives, it's incredible, there's no other feeling like it.

Some of the best records are the ones that really affect you the most - they're pure emotion and energy, and it's like you're in that person's brain. It's pretty cool.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

For the introvert, conversation can be a very limited forum for self expression. When a song moves you, a writer gets you or a theory enlightens you, you and its creator are connecting in a realm beyond sight or speech.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist."

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

A well-composed song strikes the mind and softens the feelings, and produces a greater effect than a moral work, which convinces our reason, but does not warm our feelings, nor effect the slightest alteration in our habits

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

The arts can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

When someone comes to me and says the music I've made has affected them emotionally, that's the most gratifying part of my job.

For me a film is at its best when you can start filling in the story with your own life experience.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

Patti, did art get us?' I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.' Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.

The fine arts, both in those who cultivate and those only who admire them, open and expand the mind to great ideas. They inspire liberal feelings, create a harmony of temper, favorable to a sense of justice and a habit of moderation in our social intercourse.