Ralph Ellison Quotes

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

Art, when done well, creates empathy.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.

Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.

The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word.

Literature universalizes the truth.

Music, like film, is an incredible tool for creating empathy.

We will always need to be reminded that we are human. Art gives us that.

What helps you as an actor when it comes to roles is that deeper understanding of so many different fractions of humanity. Because oftentimes, even in comedy, there is conflict.

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

Your actions are not in a vacuum. They impact other people. It may be in a way that's less obvious than in mainstream movies, but it comes to an understanding of who those people are. It also leaves it open to interpretation. And that's what art is, a form in which people can reflect on who we are as human beings and come to some understanding of this journey we are on.

I believe that the arts make indispensable contributions to our understanding.

We can never truly understand the people we hate; we can never truly hate the people we understand.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

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

The appreciation of the merits of art (of the emotions it conveys) depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life...

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.

Taste is, in general, considered as that faculty of the human mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature or art.

I love the art history ones because it's so little work for me. There's so many paintings that when I look at them, the look on the lady's face is like so clear and her body language and her posture or their physical situation is so immediately recognizable. Anyone who's been in a conversation they didn't want to have, or been getting harangued by a little kid they didn't want to pay attention to or been tired and wanted to go to bed is just like, "Yes, of course."

I want more awareness of humanity in this world.

Above all, it is a matter of loving art, not understanding it.