Marc Chagall Quotes

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe.

Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.

Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle.

A picture is like a prayer.

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.

Sometimes people save the best part of themselves for their art.

Art is one of the sources through which the soul expresses itself and inspires others. But to express art thoroughly, one must have the inner emotions opened thoroughly.

The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.

All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

Music has always been a part of me and art in general. I love visual art as well.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Every time I sit for a song, I feel I am finished. It's like a beggar sitting waiting for God to fill your bowl with the right thought. In every song, I ask help from Him. Everybody around is so good, so to create music that will connect with so many people is not humanly possible without inspiration.

I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.