Nadia Boulanger Quotes

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.

Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

It's the emotion...each word has got a connotation and symbolism and the thing is finding what's behind the word-what meaning it has and what emotion. I'm really into vocal repetition as a definite art form.

In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Art is the ability to communicate through an intermediary and to convey one's feelings through an isolated object. It's inspiration and incubation. Putting my subjective feelings into an objective form and then on to you for a subjective interpretation.

grievance does not make for great art.

...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

In Utero is a testament to the artistic vision of Kurt Cobain. It's kind of a weird record, and it's strangely beautiful at the same time. And if you look at Kurt's paintings and his drawings - he even did a sculpture for me - it's a rising, tortured-spirit person. It's kind of weird. It's done well, but it's like what Dave was saying about having your own sound. Kurt was a great songwriter. He knew he had a good ear for a hook [and was] a great singer, great guitar player, and In Utero is a good representation of what he liked in art and how he expressed himself.

The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.

Life should be lived to the point of tears

You always want to translate as much emotion as you can, even if it's broader with bigger emotions.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.

The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.