Neil Patrick Harris Quotes

Our jobs as artists is to make sure our art tells a real story and let people see themselves in these characters. It's about having a conversation about being better people.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

I want to make films without a single clear message, and films that are as close as possible to what it feels like to be alive. At least to me.

Anything that reflects the human condition back on humans in the entertainment medium is art.

There's always something more to be accomplished with a character. Theater is a human experience. There's nothing shellacked or finished off about it. I guess that's why it always draws me back.

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

I'd say, at the end of the day, you know, from a songwriting practice standpoint, you write songs to make yourself feel something true and validating, and cathartic, maybe, and then whoever responds to it is, like, out of your control.

I don't think Beethoven expresses religious truth. He expresses a human truth.

What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.

I'm very proud of the work I do, but I genuinely can't involve myself with an audience as early as somebody who's not part of the film can. So there's that side of theater that appeals to me, where you give something and the response to what you've created is a communion between you and the dark that contains however many people. It's thrilling not having a reflection other than through the people you're communicating with. But people ask, "What do you prefer?" and I don't have a preference. I love them both. I really do.

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

The only thing an artist is useful for, and the only reason why we don't just line 'em up against the wall and shoot them, is because, at their best, they're the reflection of our lives, that most regular people can't even afford to think about.

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

I love theater. I think theater, when its done right, is the best, like a religious experience. When it is done badly, it's the worst thing. It's just an incredible experience.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world.

There are so many things to be considered in making music. The whole question of life itself... I know that I want to produce beautiful music, music that does things to people that they need.

What I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

I use my platform for more than just myself. Art is a reflection of human emotions. To neglect the political is to neglect what essentially is your job of storytelling. I would rather be known for the content of my character than for the project that I did.