Adrienne Rich Quotes

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.

What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.

Music is the perfect type of art.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

I think that experiencing through art is a wonderful way to expand the horizon and everything around it.