Denis Dutton Quotes

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

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.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

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

What is art but a way of seeing?

People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.

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

The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.

Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

Art trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

Art is not about understanding, it’s about experience.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

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.

Art is a sense of magic.

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.