Jacques Maritain Quotes

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.

Whatever we were saying in our music had to represent something and really stand for something. I just wanted to do something with purpose.

Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level, there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to perform a particular function.

I think there's art, and then there's illustration. Art comes from a deeper place.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

The artist’s aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give information, whether the viewer understands the information is incidental to the artist.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

The artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. Have it on the screen but have the people come out of the theater into a world of peace, of a beautiful world. They don't have to suffer in their lives.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

Only art means anything.

All good art is about something deeper than it admits.