Johan Huizinga Quotes

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

What is music for? It's to make you feel good.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

Never understood a lot about the world... music is one of the only things that makes any sense.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world.

To analyze the charms of flowers is like dissecting music; it is one of those things which it is far better to enjoy, than to attempt to fully understand.

Music and love are the only accomplishments of humanity which do not, in an absolute sense, have to be called attempts with unsuitable means.

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

With Dick Smith there, and the words of Peter Shaffer... they've got to be the most beautiful descriptions in music ever written on film or in literature. And we could hear the music accompanying the words... What more can you ask for?

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

I would say that to put architecture in the chain of history, to be able to interpret and understand why we are where we are, is quite crucial.

Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.

Art is what can't be proven mathematically, right, it's where science ends. It's the part that makes you feel good, but you don't know why.

I'm always interested in looking - historically - at how theater can animate history and how all of that can make us engage with our lives in an enriching way.

If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that's such a rare gift. It's underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

I've always been attracted to classic patterns in architecture, music and drama.

Popular sings are the only art form that describes the temper of the times.

The context of history proved invaluable.

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?'