Louis Althusser Quotes

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

Colors answer feeling in man; shapes answer thought; and motion answers will.

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

Art is not about understanding, it’s about experience.

As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Art is more engaging that propaganda.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

What is art but a way of seeing?

People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

I've always loved color because it's a little bit like music. I love that it seems to be both physical and ephemeral and engages us as a metaphor for our feeling lives.

Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.

Art is great. At its best, it engages the intellect and challenges the spirit; it connects us across history and reminds us of our humanity.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.