All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Psychology | Behavior
[Albert] Schweitzer observed that there are two types of artists: the subjective, who use their personality as the wellspring of their art and live as “a law unto themselves,” and the objective, whose “artistic personality exists independently of the human” and whose art is “not impersonal, but superpersonal,” channeling the universal and the eternal through the vessel of their being.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Art
We went on making equations and theories and bombs in an attempt to control life; we went on making poems and paintings and songs in an attempt to live with the fact that we cannot.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Life & Society, Music, Psychology | Behavior
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Author: Mary Oliver | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
This is the great and terrifying truth about the creative life: Anything we make — all this longing for beauty and meaning, all these reckonings and raptures, these most passionate and personal fragments of being — is just a tiny seed compacting everything we are, blown into the wind that is the world.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
All of our creative work is our coping mechanism for life. Art is just what we call our instruments of self-salvation. It may touch other lives, salve and save them even, but it is always at bottom a private lifeline.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Art
Chekhov said, “The solution to a problem and the correct way of posing the question are two completely separate things. And only the latter is an artist’s responsibility.”
Author: Elif Shafak | Source: TED | Subject: Art
It’s not art if the world (or at least a tiny portion of it) isn’t transformed in some way. And it’s not art if it’s not generous. And most of all, it’s not art if there’s no risk. The risk isn’t the risk of financial ruin (though that might be part of it). No, the risk is the risk of rejection. Of puzzlement. Of stasis. … [ Read more ]
Author: Seth Godin | Subject: Art
There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.
Author: Francis Bacon | Subjects: Art, Beauty | Aesthetics, Concepts
But what kind of knowledge is concerned with that which is outside and independent of all relations, that which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and therefore is known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas, which are the direct and adequate objectivity of the thing in-itself, … [ Read more ]
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer | Subjects: Art, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
All great works suffer from and are saved by a gladsome blindness to what they ultimately demand of their creators.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Insight, Literature | Arts
To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
But it seems to me it’s that awakening to the full potential of what your life might be—beyond the possibilities your own family, your own class, your own race, your own neighborhood gives you—which is one of the great human gifts that art affords.
Author: Dana Gioia | Subjects: Ability | Skill, Art
Where the world ceases to be the stage for personal hopes and desires, where we, as free beings, behold it in wonder, to question and to contemplate, there we enter the realm of art and of science. If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of logic, we are doing science; if we show it in forms whose interrelationships are not … [ Read more ]
Author: Albert Einstein | Subjects: Art, Math & Science
Aesthetic judgment involves the appreciation of objects that are inherently beautiful, while taste involves the appreciation of objects in relation to ourselves.
There’s a paradox in all of this, Gurstein notes: “In the quarrel over forgeries, those who love beauty for its own sake are sophisticated aesthetes and those who care more for the work’s pedigree than its aesthetic qualities are philistines.” But in today’s culture … [ Read more ]
Author: Rochelle Gurstein | Subjects: Art, Beauty | Aesthetics
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Author: Tom Stoppard | Subjects: Ability | Skill, Art, Imagination
Science is a discipline you practice with passion, and art is a passion you practice with discipline.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Art, Math & Science
Life is short,
Art long,
Occasion sudden and dangerous,
Experience deceitful,
and Judgment difficult.
Author: Hippocrates | Subjects: Art, Experience, Life & Society