Elif Batuman Quotes

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.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

What one person might see as violent, someone else may see as beautiful. Maybe even art.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

Art is truth.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

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

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

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

The world is a dream, you say, and it’s lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky.” “No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?

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.

The truth is ugly: we have art so as not to perish from the truth.

Art is to beauty what honor is to honesty.

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

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

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.

Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

Art is a sense of magic.