Art, Culture and Beauty quotes and sayings

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth.

If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

Science is what you know, philosophy what you don't know.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you`re got music.

I was the only guy with any bit of anarchy left.

A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.

I'll play with it first and tell you what it is later.

God is subtle, but He is not malicious. I cannot believe that God plays dice with the world.

He that falls into sin is a man; that grieves at it, is a saint; that boasteth of it, is a devil.

Either he's dead or my watch has stopped

I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.

For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Drama is life with the dull parts cut out of it.

Television has brought back murder into the home -- where it belongs.

In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.

The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.