Explaining Art Quotes & Sayings

It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. — Guy De Maupassant

Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade. — Richard Dawkins

The mechanical mind has a passion for control - of everything except itself. Beyond the control it has won over the forces of nature it would now win control over the forces of society of stating the problem and producing the solution, with social machinery to correspond. — L. P. Jacks

So called art films. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films "reality". — Haruki Murakami

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems. — Laura Miller

know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. - Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? — Zia Haider Rahman

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing. — Toni Morrison

Nobody can deprive me of the fact that I had a good time. — Giacomo Casanova

The universe takes us as seriously as we take it. — Marianne Williamson

I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric. — Shea Hembrey

In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. "Explaining" them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living. — Stanley Kubrick

It hardly needs explaining at length, I think, how much authority or beauty is added to style by the timely use of proverbs. In the first place who does not see what dignity they confer on style by their antiquity alone? ... And so to interweave adages deftly and appropriately is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles from Antiquity, please us with the colours of the art of rhetoric, gleam with jewel-like words of wisdom, and charm us with titbits of wit and humour. — Desiderius Erasmus

Aye, Rob, but we canna help noticin' ye also have tae do the Explainin', too,' said Daft Wullie.
There was a general nodding from the crowd. To Feegles, Explaining was a dark art. It was just so HARD.
'Like, when we come back from drinkin', stealin', and fightin', Jeannie gives ye the Pursin' o' the Lips,' Daft Wullie went on.
A moan went up from all the Feegles: 'Ooooh, save us from the Pursin' o' the Lips!'
'An' there's the Foldin' o' the Arms,' said Wullie, because he was even scaring himself.
'Oooooh, waily, waily, waily, the Foldin' o' the Arms!' the Feegles cried, tearing at their hair.
'Not tae mention the Tappin' o' the Feets ... ' Wullie stopped, not wanting to mention the Tappin' o' the Feets.
'Aargh! Oooooh! No' the Tappin' o' the Feets!' Some of the Feegles started to bang their heads on trees. — Terry Pratchett

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him. — Victor Hugo

Does it seem to you that it is possible to speak of Art? It would be the same as explaining love! — Eleanora Duse

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. — John Locke

There are two types of girls: those that can make cheap clothes look expensive and those that make designer clothes look cheap. — Lauren Santo Domingo

Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There's no longer a need for the social construct of religion. — David G. McAfee

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for. — Julian Barnes

Nick commenced a monologue explaining the impossibility of such a phenomenon: the subordination of content to the aesthetics of language in Arabic literature, the dominance of panegyrics and eulogies as an art form, etc. — Rabih Alameddine

Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation. — Eugene H. Peterson

What does the novel know? It has no practical or educational aim; yet it knows what ordinary knowledge cannot seize. The novel's intricate tangle of character-and-incident alights on the senses with a hundred cobwebby knowings fanning their tiny threads, stirring up nuances and disclosures. The arcane designs and driftings of metaphor - what James called the figure in the carpet, what Keats called negative capability, what Kafka called explaining the inexplicable - are that the novel knows. — Cynthia Ozick