Dan Colen Quotes

Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.

Images adorn our inner life and carry great power there.

I think that there is a sort of spiritual power that is translating into our bodies as we perform. Performers give, and giving is so important. It can heal. That is my experience, anyway.

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.

Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.

The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.

Honestly, I'm not a big person in terms of religion, but I really believe in nature. I feel like anytime you see anything beautiful in nature that's the closest I'm ever going to get to God or a sense of a higher power.

But only art and music have the power to bring peace.

I'd like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

The obsession with performance left no room for the development of the intuitive or spiritual impact of space and form other than the aesthetic of the machine itself.

I think art is a consolation regardless of its content. It has the power to move and make you feel like you're not.

The buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.

Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.

Music is a gut thing. You're working in a medium which is more in touch with the primal than the modern. A gig is a ritual. There's a congregation.

Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body. It is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn't.

I talk about religion because it's one of the ways human beings find power and belonging. Religion is more than just that - I think faith traditions give us ways to talk about experiences of the numinous, too - but power and belonging are a big part of it.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words.

I value above all the ability of art to move me emotionally and psychically, without answers. I make art that makes me question, that derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation, that is intuitive, that is beautiful.

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.

I believe inanimate objects have a spirit.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.