Sean Lock Quotes

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it's equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.

The idea that one might use art for 'instrumental' reasons tends to set off alarm bells at the heart of the cultural elite, who contend that it's not a pill, that it shouldn't be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to 'cheer you up' or to 'make you a more empathetic person.'

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.

Bring the arts back, and treat it with respect.

I think it would be criminal if there was no art in school.

A lot of people are intimated by art, but it's something to be revered beyond criticism.

Art makes better humans, art is necessary in understanding the world and art makes people happy. Undeniably, art is not optional.

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

I'm sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn't make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.

The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

When an artist paints a picture he does not want you to consider his personality as represented in that picture - he wants you to look at the beauty of that picture. No one cares who has painted the picture as long as it is beautiful.

Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

That complete statement which is literature.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

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

Believe it or not, there are places in the world where music is important. There are places in the world where all the arts are a matter of national pride.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Art is to beauty what honor is to honesty.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.