Alain Resnais Quotes

The aim of art is to understand and establish order, which is another form of beauty.

I mean, what is music anyway? It's a form of communication - at least for me it is. And that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

Dancing pleases me. I hope I transmit that to others.

The singer alone does not make a song, there has to be someone who hears. -Broken Song

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 that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

Compared to the spoken word, a picture is a pitiful thing, indeed.

I don't see poetry as something that has to do with too much emotion anyway. It has to do with language.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.

Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.

one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.

A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.

Images are really powerful. People fall in love with images, and as a way of falling in love with someone because they're like an image.

Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule, seems to have more freedom, and therefore more for taste, than a song of a human being which is produced in accordance with all the rules of music; for we very much sooner weary of the latter, if it is repeated often and at length. Here, however, we probably confuse our participation in the mirth of a little creature that we love, with the beauty of its song; for if this were exactly imitated by man (as sometimes the notes of the nightingale are) it would seem to our ear quite devoid of taste.

Organized perception is what art is all about.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.