Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

People forget that art is not just a piece of entertainment. It is the place where we collectively declare our values and then act on them. That's one of the most powerful things we have as a community: our culture and our art. And it's the intersection between life and how people deal with life. It's the most important thing we do.

When we separate music from life we get art.

One day, music will take its rightful place as the true religion of Mankind.

I believe that the arts make indispensable contributions to our understanding.

Art is such an important part of our culture.

There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.

Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.

Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about.

Art. Its definitions are legion, its meanings multitudinous, its importance often debated. But amid the many contradictory definitions of art, one has always stood the test of time, from the Upanishads in the East, to Michelangelo in the West: art is the perception and depiction of the sublime, the transcendent, the beautiful, the spiritual.

Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.

Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible - and this is Art.

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

I don't believe in very many things, but art is definitely one of them. And at the top of that list, film and art influence our world's culture much more than many of us understand and fully respect.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.