A provincial who finds himself
somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one...
It's this in-between that I'm calling a province,
the frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one -
which is really the realm of the artist.
-Frederico Fellini
The primary purpose of all art forms,
whether it's music, literature or visual arts,
is to say something to the outside world,
in other words, to make a personal thought,
a striking idea, an inner emotion perceptible to other people's senses
in such a way that there's no uncertainty about the maker's intentions.
-M. C. Escher
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.
-Susanne Langer
To love something as an artist...
means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value,
but by a side of it that suddenly opens up.
Where art has value it shows things that few have seen.
It's conquering, not pacifying.
-Robert Musil
There is no such thing as a difficult piece of music.
A piece is either impossible or easy.
The process whereby it migrates from one category to the other
is known as practicing.
-Yehudi Menuhin
It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life.
I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach.
I cannot think of doing otherwise.
It is a sort of benediction on the house.
But that is not its only meaning for me.
It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part.
It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life,
with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.
The music is never the same for me, never.
Each day is something new, fantastic, unbelievable.
That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!
-Pablo Casals
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts -
it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure - and the most sensual.
I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response
to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.
-Susan Sontag
I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music,
not in a sentimental sense, but structurally.
I don't try to do it, it just sometimes comes.
-Ansel Adams
Architecture is the alphabet of giants;
it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men.
A tower stands up like a sort of simplified statue,
of much more than heroic size.
-G. K. Chesterton
Art is contemplation.
It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature
and which there divines the spirit
of which Nature herself is animated.
-Auguste Rodin
Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space,
and the measure of its success
is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world -
the extent to which it invites you in
and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
-Leonard Bernstein
A work of art succeeds in the revelation of beauty
when viewers enter into it, when they empathize.
When they engage in the aesthetic emotion,
they experience a degree of self-forgetfulness.
-Edward Clark
It is ultimately the function of art...
to bring us to a condition
of serenity, stillness and reconciliation,
and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante,
to proceed towards a region
where that guide can avail us no further.
-T. S. Eliot
I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being.
It's a strange thing that every human being
has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him,
and out of that develops relationships to other human beings,
tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact,
touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.
-Ingmar Bergman
Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world;
they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole;
what they offer is not "discourse about"nor a cipher to be decoded,
but a prolonged incitement to finesse.
-Jacques Barzun
