Paul Kurtz Quotes

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it's art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I'd like to add a little to that goodness.

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

We human beings are spiritual beings. We have soul. We have spirit. We have mind. We have consciousness. We want fulfillment, we want happiness, we want satisfaction, we want joy. We want imagination. We want art, culture, music.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts.

The arts and humanities define who we are as a people. That is their power -- to remind us of what we each have to offer, and what we all have in common. To help us understand our history and imagine our future. To give us hope in the moments of struggle and to bring us together when nothing else will.

If it [dabbling in art] didn't amuse me, I beg you to believe that I wouldn't do it.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

Without literature, life is hell.

Whether I'm in front of the camera, behind the camera, at my computer writing a novel or a screenplay, as long as I get to entertain someone out there, I'm happy.

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

I think we all mistake certain things for happiness. I think we mistake comfort for happiness and we mistake pleasure for happiness, and entertainment for happiness, when really these are just things we use as proxies for our happiness. We use them to cheer us up or try and achieve brief happiness, when really happiness is something much more profound and long lasting and exists within us.

I went to college as a theater major. But after about three weeks of that, I changed to the school of fine arts as a painter.

The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we're a part.

I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. Adult. You have become adult.

As we grow older, our capacity for enjoyment shrinks, but not our appetite for it.

It's assumed that if you're a woman, you want to be the prettiest version of yourself. It always put me in a bad mood. It was like, "OK, I'm successful. I'm supposed to be happy. Well, why aren't I happy?" Part of the problem was that my looked-at-ness had become a priority over my art making. Over and over again it was like, "I don't have time for this. I want to work." I love writing. I don't love somebody putting false eyelashes on me.

Art matters because it is the one true great connector in a world that seems to be very unconnected.

Line is the most powerful device of drawing.

Art is one of man's few serious activities.

On a more human level, the closest things to truths that I have been able to access are Love, Art, and Play.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

I am never happier than when I have something to compose, for that, after all, is my sole delight and passion