Joseph Joubert Quotes

In art, the only one who really knows whether what you've done is honest is the artist.

Many filmmakers pretend that they never see anything, which has always seemed odd to me.

I'm not just painting for painting's sake. I want to be truthful.

The truth is not wonderful enough to suit the newspapers; so they enlarge upon it, and invent ridiculous embellishments.

My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I'd done it - the people I'd written about.

The assembly has witnessed how historical truth is established. Once an allegation is repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation. It is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

Whatever films we make we should be honest in the genre we are making.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

the truth is artistically fallacious.

There is no truth in photography. One can't reproduce an absolute truth. That said, I don't see [my photographs] as being any less truthful than any other photographs.

I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are.

Artistic truth is for me literally the highest truth: art may seize the essence of persons and movements no less truly, and certainly far more vitally, than a scientific generalization unifies a chaos of phenomena. Time and Space are only the conditions through which spiritual facts struggle. Hence I have here and there permitted myself liberties with these categories.

An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.

For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.

The quality most important to me, in the films I make, is honesty.

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.

Photography is the truth if it’s being handled by a truthful person.

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.

Art: to nudge truth along a little.