Quotes on the Arts

In art there are no final answers; there are only questions that lead to new ways of understanding. – Katherine Kuh

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? – Pablo Picasso

Art is the extension of the power of rites and ceremonies to unite men, through a shared celebration, to all incidents and scenes of life. – John Dewey

Art cannot be known but only experienced, and art belongs to man. When great art is so deeply felt and understood, it ceases to be a collection of beautiful objects and becomes instead a succession of gateways. And whenever this happens art reveals the path of beauty. – Alexander Eliot

Art consists, not in calling a thing by the right name, and not in calling it by the wrong name, but in evoking that which has no name. – Albert Guerard

Symbolic art goes back through Time even to beginnings that are forgotten; evades the ephemeral and twines like a tendril about the essential, drawing sustenance from all great moments; penetrates below surfaces, through flesh and nerves to the quick core of being; taps the very sources of joy and grief, and startles from their slumber those race-memories that live unnoted in the still places of the soul. – Shaemas O’Sheel

The poet’s creative life, like the life of a dancer dancing – “Dying into a dance, an agony of trance” – is lived in a trancelike poise between the two, between the all-uniting unconscious and separating consciousness, between universal and personal, “between his two eternities, that of race and that of soul.” – James Olney, from Yeats

The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things. – W.B. Yeats

Artists are ambassadors from an alternate reality. – Maxine Greene