Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

I think there is a debate in the arts about, you know, whether we must strive for art for art's sake, and you know, kind of try to keep political debate out of our work. And to that I say, I'd like you to show me an example of, you know, this so-called apolitical art. I don't think there's any such thing.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

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

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic

Art is transformative. It's not 2+2=4. It works like the sea. It changes geography through its constant and relentless movement, just the way plants and water shape the world.

Art is truth.

Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level, there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to perform a particular function.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Art is a delivery system for worldviews.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever.