Martin Buber Quotes

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

With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.

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.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

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.

There must be something about art... almost all cultures have done art. It's a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that.

Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

Art... can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

One's roused by this, another finds that fit: Each loves the play for what he brings to it.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

Patti, did art get us?' I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.' Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

I don't buy art in order to leave a mark or to be remembered; clutching at immortality is of zero interest to anyone sane.

To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.