Simone Weil Quotes

I was brought up feeling that art is a very important part of one's life. It's something that I not only enjoy, it's something I can share with others.

Without art, you don't have society. It underpins so much.

The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

No arts, no letters - no society.

The arts can enrich all of us in this nation as individuals. The arts can enrich all of our communities and the country. And the arts can connect us to each other like nothing else can.

The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.

A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

The art of tomorrow will be a collective treasure, or it will not be art at all.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.

The real aim of music is to co-ordinate the minds of the people into an intelligent reach for a better world and an intelligent approach to the living future.

Art never expresses anything but itself.

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

If I don't understand it, it must be art.

You’re getting rid of the things that people used to think were essential to art. But that reduction is only incidental. I object to the whole reduction idea…if my work is reductionist it’s because it doesn’t have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has other elements I like.

I think something happens with age. And I find this really a lot in what I read from certain art critics: For people who are all about change-people who are supposed to be intellectually and culturally drawn to the idea of change and how the voice of a creative person affects the world on a bigger scale than just the canvas-I would expect a person in that position to have that open mind. It's only a sign of age that they become so locked in their own rules that they forget that this is what it's all about.

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

I find that it's a very odd thing to think of competition when you're talking about what I still think of as art. I don't think of competing with actors or filmmakers at all. You do compete, in a way, at the box office, but we're far enough apart when both films are coming out that I'm not concerned with that either.

The Whole Business of Man is The Arts, & All Things Common.

The whole point of what I do - the monster ball, the music, the performance art aspect of it, I wanna create a space for my fans where they can feel free and they can celebrate because I didn't fit in in high school and I felt like a freak, so I like to create this atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in me to hang out with and they don't feel alone.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc, but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality.

Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives