We have art in order not to die of the truth.
—Nietzsche
“The world must be romanticized. In this way, its original meaning will be rediscovered. Romanticization is nothing but a qualitative realization of potential. The lower self is identified, in this operation, with a better self. As we are ourselves are such a qualitative series of empowerings.
This operation is as yet quite unknown. Insofar as I give a higher meaning to what is commonplace, and a mysterious appearance to what is ordinary, the dignity of the unknown to what is known, a semblance of infinity to what is finite, I romanticize it.”
~ Novalis
"Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out.
The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain.
The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife's love is the birth of a new man into life.
The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength."
~ Leo Tolstoy
“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
~ Joyce Carol Oates
"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
“I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don’t have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination... It’s the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.”
—Mary Oliver
"I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense."
~ David Lynch
Art attracts us only by what
it reveals of our most
secret self.
~ Jean-Luc Godard
The purpose of art is to wash the dust of daily life off our souls.
—Pablo Picasso
Art gives us the illusion
of liberation from the
sordid business
of being.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Making art is a mystical process — a lot of people who are artists don’t understand it themselves. Especially the young ones. They feel different, but they don’t know what it is. They feel more.
Everything hurts. Everything. They’re supersensitive. They see things that other people don’t see. It can be crippling. For someone like Kurt Cobain, it can kill you.
~ Rick Rubin
Art is to console those who are broken by life. -Vincent Van Gogh
“The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom.”
— Albert Camus
“Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.”
—Roger Scruton
"Art and reading are the only decent ejaculations of the soul." —Joris-Karl Huysmans
“Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?”
—Kathleen Raine
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
—James Baldwin
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