Oliver Sacks Quotes

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

No arts, no letters - no society.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

Contemporary art will help me to modernise our society.

The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.

I'm a human who is aware of the history of humanity and the ways in which the movies touch on those things.

Culture civilizes us, and that's why every single despotic regime has tried to smash [the arts].

True art is but the anti-type of nature; the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility.

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

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.

It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.

American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.

Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.