Anton Chekhov Quotes

In Europe they understand that the arts are incredibly important both culturally and economically.

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.

The life of the arts is far from an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nations' civilization.

Yeah, unfortunately [ films like Miss Julie are a dying breed]. And that is sad, because we need these. Like we need books, we need classical music, we need ballet, we need opera, to remind us really of who we are and why we are, and we need in movie houses - even to be in a movie - where you sit and see not only excitement and man-hero, woman-hero, you need quietly, just like that Hawking movie we talked about, to know how people overcome.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

I was raised with the idea that the arts were a doss - but the arts are vital. If you see Mark Rylance perform Shakespeare at the Globe, you know it's a spiritual act.

I think that a society lives or dies according to its respect for - for its art.

Bring the arts back, and treat it with respect.

The National Gallery is the place that means to represent everything that's good and important in art and show what it believes everyone who is a citizen should recognize and engage.

I believe that the arts of a culture are terribly important and yet almost indefensible.

The value of the arts cannot be measured by its ability to preserve life but rather to enhance existence.

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.

Believe it or not, there are places in the world where music is important. There are places in the world where all the arts are a matter of national pride.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.

I see little more important to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist.

We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.