Artistic Insight Quotes

The kindest thing a director can do is look with open eyes at everything.

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.

The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

Art does not reflect what is seen, rather it makes the hidden visible.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

I was being an artist, being sensitive and technical as artists are. I'm sure Leonardo Da Vinci did that. Artists don't always feel the same as others feel about their work.

When I heard 'Jesus, Take the Wheel,' I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you're a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.

Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

As art reveals the artist more than the world, so you see yourself and what you are not in the mirror of another culture.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Art is a way of recognizing oneself.

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

I think the dark psychology of human beings is very interesting as an artist.

Art knows, life applies knowledge; art feels, life acts.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster.

It's tricky to ask a filmmaker to explain his own work; usually we're the least qualified to make sense of what we've done, unfortunately, because of the tunnel vision required to create anything over four years.

Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.

It's very strange: if you're a philosopher or musician or an artist, people automatically believe you can see the future. Even if they don't like you, they accept your vision as an individual.