Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?

It should be if you're a good singer and a good songwriter, you should have your spot. You get everybody trying to release the prettiest guy, but that doesn't mean they're the best artist. Most of the time the true artists are just normal old dudes.

In art economy is always beauty.

Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

We can't put up a movie that looks beautiful but doesn't have substance.

I just don't know what makes a picture, really - the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it's beautiful and another one can write it and it's dead. What the difference is, I don't know.

Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

Writing, painting, singing -- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death's footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.

It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism.

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

You do this because you like it, you think what you're making is beautiful. And if you think it's beautiful, maybe they think it's beautiful.

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.

Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.

The useful may be trusted to further itself, for many produce it and no one can do without it; but the beautiful must be specially encouraged, for few can present it, while yet all have need of it.

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.

Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Only a man of inner silences becomes a creator. And we need more and more creative people in the world. Their very creativity, their very silence, their very love, their very peace will be the only way to protect this beautiful planet.

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words. ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning. ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.

Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty.

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.