Stephane Mallarme Quotes

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

Colors produce a spiritual vibration, the impression they create is important only as a step towards this vibration.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn't.

Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being... You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

I'm much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

It's really amazing to stand in front of a work you haven't seen before and be almost overwhelmed by its beauty and the vision and execution of the artist.

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

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

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

The width of a line may present the idea of infinity. An epigram may contain a world. In the same way, a small picture format may be much more living, much more leavening, stirring, awakening, than square yards of wall space.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.