Remy de Gourmont Quotes

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

The true test of all the arts is not solely whether the production is a true copy of nature, but whether it answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

Art to be art must soothe.

A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.

The end-purpose of all art is enjoyment!

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

The purpose of art is to console and amuse—myself, and, I hope, others.

But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

Art does not imitate, but interpret. It searches out the idea lying dormant in the symbol, in order to present the symbol to men in such form as to enable them to penetrate through it to the idea. Were it otherwise, what would be the use or value of art?

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

I think what's important for myself and anyone else who wants to create a film, or art, is [to] make sure that they have something to say, that they want to share something important, express something important.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.