expression of human experience Quotes

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.

Art takes different forms... But it represents something that is basic in all of us-our history.

Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

I think art is about human existence. Almost by default I'm expressing my experiences as a human.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Art is the response of the living to life. It is therefore the record left behind by civilization.

I love art because I feel that it's evidence of the great shared universal power. I like art that feels real, that cuts the bullshit.

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.

Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive.

Art is about people. I think the discussion about whether architecture is art or not is lamebrain.

I think that the job of art and culture is to jump on that time and realize that it's there and to push it just a little bit faster.

What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life.

I think art is the development of this interface between mind and matter, between mind and phenomenon, between what's inside of us and what's happening outside of us. It developed over the course of the last 35,000 years. We made a lot of improvements because it not only gave us the tools to understand the world better, but it also gave us better and better tools to do it. It's that continuous relationship: technology and discernment.