Nadia Boulanger Quotes

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?'

The exercise of criticism always destroys for a time our sensibility to beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws of construction. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of art.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

I think the sensation of being moved by a piece of art is something that is really good for a person's soul.

Cinema and the arts invite viewers to focus on a story and, in doing so, peel away its layers and peer into the depths of the human soul.

The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like 'Breaking the Waves,' or as light as it gets, like 'Jerry Maguire,' 'Election' or 'Toy Story.'

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

The beauty of any artwork is that it becomes the person that's watching it: What do you take out of it?

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.

Admiration is the emotion furthest from understanding. ~Sosuke Aizen

Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.

The desire to please is maligned, unfairly. There are many sides to it. First of all, pictures have to arouse interest before people will even look at them, and then they have to show something that holds that interst - and naturally they have to be presentable, just as a song has to be sung well, otherwise people run away. One mustn't underrate this quality, and I have always been delighted when my pieces have also appealed to the museum guards, the laymen.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.

I love animated films when they are good, because they do bring a lot of emotion and heart that's very difficult to get in a live action film.

A brain with no heart and no reasoning ... well, nothing is more meaningless.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

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

Her heart is older than her head; yea, her emotion is the mother of her reason

What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you've made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between.

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.