Quotes
The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.
The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.
When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity...
Science may explain aspects of art but it will not replace the inspiration that art evokes...
The function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths.
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of depression, but a Beethoven symphony reveals what that depression feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
The painted, engraved, and carved images of prehistory are threads from past cultures, and we are foreigners trying to interpret their meaning. Perhaps more than anything else, art can be fully understood only in the context of the culture that produced it.
The words Einstein chose to open the 1939 World's Fair echo in my brain: "If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of the people."
How useless is painting, which attracts admiration by the resemblance of things, the originals of which we do not admire!
Sunsets in pictures are so tiresome, but only boors and half-wits are not stirred by real sunsets.
The Land is neither of the Dark nor the Light, nor ever was. Its enchantment was of a separate kind, the magic of the mind and the hand and the eye, that owes no allegiance because it is neither good nor bad. It has no more to do with the behaviour of men, or the great absolutes of the Light and the Dark, than does the blossom of a rose or the curving leap of a fish.
p. 164
We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world.
p. 36
