Walter Benjamin Quotes

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

When you see or hear something beautiful, it's like that thing is transmitting a kind of energy, and if that energy helped create the work, the only thing I can do is play it when I finally show the work.

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Every artist wants his or her work to connect with someone. I think that's why people make art.

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'.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

In truth, factual information - names or dates - have never interested me much. Those things are like an alien language that can interfere with the language of the painting, or even prevent its emergence.

For art to be art it has to cure.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

I feel like you have to make art because you have to make it. But the end result of it- that last stage- you have to show it to somebody else to hopefully get a rise or reaction out of them- [to see] if it’ll affect someone else.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

Poetry is a verdict rather than an intention.

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.

I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.

When you're an artist you're speaking about life, you're talking about your experience here on the planet. So essentially, that's what I do when I'm writing songs.