Karen Armstrong Quotes

Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

You stand in front of a great painting and your heart just opens and your mind expands about what's possible. That, to me, is a connection to what God is.

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

The people who love my paintings, that respond to them the most, they're spectators, they're not viewers.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

Art is inspiring. Walking into a gallery, or when the lights go up on a stage; that thrill of getting something that has nothing to do with acquisition.

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

I love grand opera. I can't hear 'La Boheme' without dissolving.

It is amazing how many thoughts can race through your head in a minute.

It's always nice to remember that there was a time when I loved something that I didn't know much about; it just reached my ears and moved me.

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.

Every passion, every emotion, has its effect upon the mind. Every change of mind, however slight, has its effect upon the body.

Despair is sometimes the great energizer of the mind, though sometimes its flowering may be sterile.

Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.

Art is for stimulation, excitement, adventure.

I hear this song and I think, Man, this is ... great. This is the best I ever heard this. I forget I'm the one singing.

Music. I could not go without that. My mind would not let me be without music. I hiked the trail in 1995 - before there were iPods or music on our cell phones or even cell phones. So I was truly out there with just my thoughts. After a few days there was a continuous loop of songs playing silently in my mind.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.

Arousal leaves us mind-blind.

Beautiful works do not intoxicate, but they enchant.

What disturbs people's minds are not events but their judgments on events.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.