Daniel Pinkwater Quotes

What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Life is earnest, art is gay.

Art is a sense of magic.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.

The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.

Music is the perfect type of art.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.

Art trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

You need the art in order to love the life.

Life may as properly be called an art as any other.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness; and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful.

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.

[...] I've come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.