Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

Anything that reflects the human condition back on humans in the entertainment medium is art.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

To me, art's highest purpose is to entertain, to enlighten, to inspire, to evoke emotion and to change an audience in some way, big or small.

Art brings a message into a room. It should make us perceive in a new way - either through color, form or narrative content - something we had not perceived before... and perhaps reveal something to you about yourself.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City - the intuition that I had been there already.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and... stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

The value of art is in the observer.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

As a viewer, my own work elicits strong emotional reaction from me.

New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart. There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.