Wynton Marsalis Quotes

I always look on imagination as one of the most powerful things we can cultivate in young people. If they have a good, active imagination, they can cope with life better; they are... able to imagine possibilities and to think around problems.

It can no longer be an afterthought in a child's development that the analytical side is not of equal to the creative side. That the creative side can be pushed aside and we just push the analytical side. Especially with the development of a child's brain at the elementary levels.

It's important to collect unusual characters. It keeps you sharp.

In addition to giving our children the science and math skills they need to compete in the new global context, we should also encourage the ability to think creatively that comes from a meaningful arts education.

People think that the arts are optional and they aren't. They teach a level of emotional depth that's equally important to mathematic skill. You can replace some math skills with a calculator if you know how to operate the thing, but there's no calculator for human interaction.

Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring both.

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.

When you're running around and playing, it's amazing ground for imagination, and that's really the biggest muscle you need for anything in the arts. I think it's probably the biggest training I've had.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

I think it's good to stimulate your mind.

I had decent but not great grades in high school because I was highly motivated in some subjects, like the arts, drama, English, and history, but in math and science I was a screw-up. Wooster saw something in me, and I really flourished there. I got into theatre, took photography and painting classes.

Scientific research and other studies have demonstrated that arts education can enhance American students' math and language skills and improve test scores which in turn increase chances of higher education and good jobs in the future.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that's powerful.

The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.

I much prefer STEAM to STEM. The insertion of the A is arts writ large, and when you learn how to think, that means that you actually need to understand how others have thought before you, how have others made sense of the world.

I think, in the West, we often discount the arts as nice but not that important. Certainly in America when we cut funding for schools, the arts are the first programs to go. But the arts built the things we need more than anything else: collaboration and co-operation and creativity.

Learning through the arts reinforces critical academic skills in reading, language arts and math, and provides students with the skills to creatively solve problems.

America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.

Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger.

But I could not imagine having a child and the child not having a relationship with music that opens up their mind and their imagination and teaches them things.

There were people who went for serious mind enhancement, like Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon, although I didn't really need to do that. I was blessed with an incredibly fertile imagination.

People that are able to think in terms of concepts and offer us valuable forms of art are very exciting to me.

It's not fair that kids feel like they have to be naturally gifted at math and science, but with, it's often pushed to the side. It doesn't make any sense to me why it shouldn't be a big part of kids' lives.

I stay away from the arts... writing songs, being creative - those are downloads from God. You can't do data analytics on art.

The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide.