ART

Related States & Conditions | Syntonic | Dystonic

Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience.
Aristotle
384-322 BCE, Greek Philosopher

Art offers an opening for the heart.
True art makes the divine silence in the soul
break into applause.
Hafiz
1320-1390, Persian Sufi Mystic, Poet

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
Leonardo Da Vinci
1452-1519, Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Scientist

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.
Goethe
1749-1832, German Poet, Novelist, Dramatist, Philosopher, Scientist

The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then fix it in form.
Francois Delsarte
1811-1871, French Singing Teacher

All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.
John Ruskin
1819-1900, English Art Critic, Philosopher, Reformer

Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
Leo Tolstoy
1828-1910, Russian Novelist, Essayist, Philosopher

Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Walter Pater
1839-1894, English Critic, Writer, Lecturer
Studies in the History of the Renaissance

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola
1840-1902, French Writer

If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.
Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, Irish Poet, Dramatist, Critic, Wit

Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known.
Wilde
in The Fortnightly Review , 1891

The greatest art of all is the art of living – and the best preparation for the art of living is the cultivated heart. The cultivated heart is in the human being who knows and appreciates our heritage and our history; who can absorb and understand and translate this understanding into action in the present and also into action for tomorrow.
Henrietta Szold
1860-1945, Philanthropist, Zionist Activist

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead
1861-1947, English Mathematician, Philosopher
Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead , 1954

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
Claude Debussy
1862-1918, French Composer, Critic

Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.
Robert Henri
1865-1929, American Painter
The Art Spirit

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.
Ibid.

Every work of art is the child of its time; often it is the mother of our emotions.
Wassily Kandinsky
1866-1944, Russian Painter

Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination.
Benedetto Croce
1866-1952, Italian Philosopher
Esthetic

Art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its handkerchief, that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance too.
W. E. B. Du Bois
1868-1963, African-American Sociologist, Writer, Political Activist

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Willa Cather
1873-1947, American Writer

Art does not reproduce what is visible; it makes things visible.
Paul Klee
1879-1940, Swiss Painter, Engraver
Creative Credo , 1920

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
E. M. Forster
1879-1970, English Writer, Essayist, Literary Critic
Two Cheers for Democracy , 1951

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Pablo Picasso
1881-1973, Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Graphic Artist

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Picasso

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
Picasso

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Nathan
1882-1958, American Critic

The artist must attune himself to that which wants to reveal itself and permit the process to happen through him.
Martin Heidegger
1889-1976, German Philosopher

The true work of art is a creation not of the hands, but of the mind and soul of the artist.
Nancy Prophet
1890-1960, African-American Sculptor

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It merely points the way … in becoming an end, it defeats itself.
Henry Miller
1891-1980, American Writer
The Wisdom of the Heart

The new work of art does not consist of making a living or producing an objet d'art or in self-therapy, but in finding a new soul. The new era is the era of spiritual creativity … and soul-making.
Ibid.

Art can express eternal truth, it is not limited to the expression of form and appearance … a man using a simple combination of lines, an unpretentious harmony of colors, can raise this apparently insignificant medium to suggest absolute and profound truths with a perfection which language labors with difficulty to reach … The great truths of religion, science, metaphysics, life, development, become concrete, emotional, universally intelligible and convincing in the hands of the master of plastic Art, and the soul of man, in the stage when it is rising from emotion to intellect, looks, receives the suggestion and is uplifted towards a higher development, a diviner knowledge.
Sri Aurobindo
1892-1950, Indian Guru
Lights on Life-Problems , Kisher Gandhi, ed.

Art is a celebration of life.
Herbert Read
1893-1968, British Writer, Critic

Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.
Read

Art is not and never has been subordinate to moral values. Moral values are social values; aesthetic values are human values. Morality seeks to restrain the feelings; art seeks to define them by externalizing them, by giving them significant form. Morality has only one aim – the ideal good; art has quite another aim – the objective truth … art never changes.
Read

The arts are a necessity in human life … It is surprising how men have learned to live without art, feel no need for it at all, let their sensibilities atrophy as it were. Then men become coarse and vulgar.
Lin Yutang
1895-1976, Chinese Writer, Dramatist, Translator
Looking Beyond

Art should be a satire and a warning against our paralyzed emotion, our devitalized thinking and our denaturalized living … It should restore us to health and sanity of living and enable us to recover from the fever and delirium caused by too much mental activity. It should sharpen our senses, re-establish the connection between our reason and our human nature, and assemble the ruined parts of a dislocated life again into a whole, by restoring our original nature.
Lin
The Importance of Living , 1937

Store up things to say, ideas, feelings, observations of life. Pour yourself out. Then lop off later; you have to have things to lop off from. There are no rules to follow in art, the theater, the novel. You have to find yourself and everything else follows.
Lin
Looking Beyond

The artist has a special task and duty – the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
Lewis Mumford
1895-1990, American Social Philosopher, Writer

All arts contribute to the greatest art of all: Lebenkunst – the art of getting through life.
Bertolt Brecht
1898-1956, German Dramatist, Poet

The ultimate in art is self-expression, not escape.
Duke Ellington
1899-1974, African American Jazz Composer, Musician

But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art – in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man.
Eric Fromm
1900-1980, German/American Psychoanalyst, Writer

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
Stella Adler
1902-1992, American Actress, Teacher

Art is the conscious apprehension of the unconscious ecstasy of all created things.
Cyril Connolly
1903-1974, English Literary Editor, Writer, Critic
Previous Convictions , 1963

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate oneself from enslavement by earth.
Anaïs Nin
1903-1977, French/American Writer

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way to experience it.
Joseph Campbell
1904-1987, American Mythologist, Educator, Writer
in Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion , Diane K. Osbon, ed., 1991

There is one art, no more no less: to do all things with artlessness.
Piet Hein
1905-1996, Danish Inventor, Poet

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form – or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
1907-, American Educator, Literary/Social Critic
The House of Intellect , 1959

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon
1909-1993, Irish Painter
in The Sunday Telegraph , 1964

The artist within must fight the battle for Meaning with pen on paper, or brush on canvas, or chisel in wood and stone. But his Way, as that of Everyman, leads from ignorance, delusion, folly, self-inflation and phoniness to truth and authenticity … The point of practicing an art is less to discover who you are than to become your truth, to be able to shed all sham, imposture and bluff in relation to yourself and others. True art is not an indulgence of the little self, but a manifestation of the Self.
Frederick Franck
1909-, Dutch Physician, Artist, Writer
Art as a Way

Art is an antidote for violence. It gives the ecstasy, the self-transcendence that could otherwise take the form of drug addiction, terrorism, suicide, or warfare.
Rollo May
1909-, American Psychoanalyst

We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
Romare Bearden
1914-1988, African-American Artist

If you're any kind of artist you make a miraculous journey and you can come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were.
Bearden

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraint it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Albert Camus
1913-1960, Algerian-French Writer, Essayist, Dramatist, 1957 Nobel Laureate
Resistance, Rebellion & Death , 1960

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.
Thomas Merton
1915-1968, American Trappist Monk, Writer
No Man Is an Island , 1955, 1983

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
Saul Bellow
1915-, Canadian/American Writer, 1976 Nobel Laureate
in Writers at Work , George Plimpton, ed., 1967

An artist creates out of the materials of the moment, never again to be duplicated. This is true of the painter, the musician, the dancer, the actor, the teacher, the scientist, the businessman, the farmer – it is true of us all, whatever our work, that we are artists so long as we are alive to the concreteness of a moment and do not use it to some other purpose.
M. C. Richards
1916-1999, American Artisan, Poet
Centering , 1989

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.
Richards

The ultimate work of art is ourselves, our personality. We are each endowed with the faculty of being able to become what we want to become; life is a great loss if we don't avail ourselves of this potential.
Vilayat Khan
1916-, Indian/British Sufi Master, Writer
Awakening: A Sufi Experience , 1999

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.
Ossie Davis
1917-, African-American Actor, Director
in Jeanne Noble, Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement.
John F. Kennedy
1917-1963, 35th US President
in The New York Times , 1963 October 27

Is getting well ever an art, or art a way to get well?
Robert Lowell, Jr.
1917-1977, American Poet

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
James Baldwin
1924-1987, African-American Writer, Dramatist, Poet, Civil Rights Activist

Great art can only be created out of love.
Baldwin

Art is inseparable from life, and form and content are one.
Paule Marshall
1929-, Barbadian-American Writer

Art is for everyone – paint, like a piece of music, is the most international thing I know.
Richard Demarco
1930-, British Artist

To reproach artists for having an insufficiently radical relation to the world has to be a complaint about art as such. And to reproach art is, in more than one way, like reproaching consciousness itself for being a burden.
Susan Sontag
1933-, American Critic, Writer

Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited … if the whole of civilization is burned so we don't have any memory of it, even then people will start to build their own art. It is a necessity – a function.
Yoko Ono
1933-, Japanese/American Musician, Artist

Art is an open-ended concept evolving in the direction of increasing information and away from existing information which has been eroded by familiarity or uselessness.
Don Burgy
1937-, American Artist
Contemporary Artists , 1977

Many artists have said that when life itself becomes fully conscious, art as we know it will vanish. Art is only a stopgap, an imperfect effort to wrest meaning from an environment where nearly everyone is sleepwalking.
Marilyn Ferguson
1938-, American Writer, Mind Researcher
The Aquarian Conspiracy , 1980

For too long we have played games we did not care about by rules we did not believe in. If there was art in our lives it was paint-by-number. Life lived as art finds its own way, makes its own friends and its own music, sees with its own eyes … To the transformed self, as to the artist, success is never a place to stay, only a momentary reward. Joy is in risking, in making new.
Ibid.

Art is a way of possessing destiny.
Marvin Gaye
1939-1984, African-American Singer, Songwriter

In the arts we contemplate our world and have the chance no longer to be strangers to the deep self that is as opaque to reason as it is transparent to the imagination.
Thomas Moore
1940-, American Psychologist, Writer
Original Self , 2000

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
Nikki Giovanni
1943-, African-American Poet, Writer, Educator, Political Activist
in Poetic Equation , 1974

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives.
Angela Davis
1944-, African-American Educator, Activist

Those who want to follow the Way of Beauty must break away from cultural dictatorship and move out into no-man's land where everything is new and unknown. They must learn to live outside of stereotypes and worn-out attitudes, and free themselves from any bonds – roles, ties, ideologies, interests, or habits – that might hold them back. They must learn all over again, without fear or hesitation, to be themselves.
Piero Ferrucci
1946-, Italian Psychologist
Inevitable Grace

Often, what we write, the music we write, and the pictures we paint are dialogues with our deepest consciousness.
Marita Golden
1950-, African-American Writer, Educator

Art has a way of opening us up and allows us to be vulnerable, to deal with our ambiguities and incongruities and contradictions, so that we can grow and mature and develop.
Cornel West
1954-, African-American Philosopher, Activist

The artist as an artisan of the sacred can cooperate in bringing the sacred to birth in this world … There is only a thin line between the artist and the healer.
Malidoma Some
1956-, Burkina Fasso Dagara Shaman, Writer
The Healing Wisdom of Africa , 1999

The essential function of art … is to become personally enlightened, wise, and whole. Then, as a consequence of the former function, the purpose of this wisdom, the purpose of art, is to make the community enlightened, wise, and whole.
Peter London
Painter, Art Therapist

Do not set stock in correct responses, in familiar ways, or in the ways of others. The solution to the problems posed in art do not lie outside in the realms of technique and formula; they reside in the realm of fresh thinking about perennial issues, in honest feelings and awakened spirit.
London
No More Secondhand Art: Awakening the Artist Within

Cooking is one of the best ways for your authentic self to remind your conscious self that you are an artist. Like the union of canvas and pigment, cooking is alchemy, a work of Wholeness-in-progress.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
American Columnist, Writer

When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting's own plan. This is often expressed as 'The brush takes the next stroke.' In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.
Julia Cameron
American Artist, Poet, Dramatist, Journalist, Writer

Art is prayer – not the vulgarised notations handed down to us in the scriptures, but a fresh vital discovery of one's own special presence in the world. Marc Chagall was once asked if he attended a synagogue; he answered that his work is his prayer.
- Joseph Zinker

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Wisdom for The Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, © 2004