Walter Benjamin Quotes

What is art but a way of seeing?

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

Art does not reflect what is seen, rather it makes the hidden visible.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

I look at everything in an artistic way.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips, teaches us to perceive reality differently.

At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.