Jean Arp Quotes

Art is for healing ourselves, and everybody needs their own personal art to heal up their problems.

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

I'd rather be home alone, painting.

Art gives me an outlet where I can be aggressive in a world where I usually can't be.

Spirituality now wanders from sex to drugs to art to revolution to violence--whatever seems to promise deliverance from the quotidian.

Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Everything that is of authentic value in life has arisen out of meditation. There is no other way. Meditation is the mother of art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture. All that is creative, all that is life-affirmative, is born out of meditation. All that is life-negative - hate, anger, jealousy, violence, war - is born out of the mind. Man has two possibilities: mind and meditation.

Art is a guarantee of sanity.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

I deal with emotional pain through therapy, writing, therapy in music. I think emotional pain is best dealt with when you use art to express it.

Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.

I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative; these things, to me, are truly the windows to your soul.

My therapist in Paris once told me that being creative is a better form of therapy for me than sitting on his couch.

The purpose of art is the fight for freedom.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

(There is) art that states the problems of society and wakes people up to make changes in their lives or in their communities,...art that offers an alternative, that demonstrates human behavior that can become a model for creativity, cooperation, freedom and playfulness, and...art that in itself provides glimpses of a larger consciousness or reflects upon the inexplicable.

Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life.

One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another. Because I think if I had to write another novel now I would really not be good in my head anymore. It's too much. The frustration is so intense of knowing that this structure is right around the corner. Writing is a particular kind of frustration.

When I can see someone that's posting the way that they're thinking about what's happening in the world right now or even art that they've created, it inspires me to do the same. It makes me turn off my phone and go paint a painting or go hike a mountain or go record a song. Those are the kind of things that social media helps me do. But it also can make me sit in my room and not do anything.

A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.

Since I cannot sing, I paint.

I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I could get from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn't say otherwise.

Every great work of art ... is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.