Georg Brandes Quotes

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

When you see or hear something beautiful, it's like that thing is transmitting a kind of energy, and if that energy helped create the work, the only thing I can do is play it when I finally show the work.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

The love of beauty in its multiple forms is the noblest gift of the human cerebrum.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Beauty does not linger; it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm; it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

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

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

Good painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty.

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.

The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

No – we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Art is the objectification of feeling.