Archibald MacLeish Quotes

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

What we have as artists is the immortalization opportunity that others don't have, because our work is lasting; it's there forever to view.

Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Art goes beyond politics. Even if there are writers who are involved in politics, eventually, in one or two centuries, it's not their politics which is going to count, but the fact of having given life to feelings, of having created characters and made a living work of art.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

'Parsifal' is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

The arts are what makes life worth living. You've got food, you've got shelter, yeah. But the things that make you laugh, make you cry, make you connect - make you love are communicated through the arts. They aren't extras.

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

Art may not have the power to change the course of history, but it can provide a perspective on historical events that needs to be heard, even if it's seldom heeded. After all the temporary influences that once directed the course of history have vanished, great art survives and continues to speak to each generation.

Shouldn't it give us pause that the oldest works of art are as impressive today in their beauty and spontaneity as they were many thousands of years ago?

What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.

Art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement.

Art is the signature of a generation; artists have a way of defining the times.

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.

Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

In my world, history comes down to language and art.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavour. The beauty endures. A work of art lives...through the generations and centuries.