Thomas Ligotti Quotes

Music is the perfect type of art.

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.

Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?

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.

The aim of art is to create space.

Art is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

Tis the privilege of Art Thus to play its cheerful part, Man on earth to acclimate And bend the exile to his fate.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

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

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life.

Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.

Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

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

Poetry is a verdict rather than an intention.

Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being.