"The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it."
- Nick Cave
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”
–– Picasso
"It is the pursuit of beauty in things and people that is the journey…the real journey.
I was happiest when I sought beauty in words and music and images.
I was happiest in movies or in the middle of a symphony…whatever allowed the mind to ponder all that was possible and glorious.
The world, I suppose, is the result of actions taken by people possessed of an image or an idea…
...and the world I care most about is constructed from those images that reminded someone of the beauty and the nobility of people…
I’m back on the job of looking for this beauty, and nothing is safe from my eyes and my ears.
I want to find and host the beauty of the world."
– Tennessee Williams
"Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can, and not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you’ll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality...It makes you eager. Stay eager."
– Susan Sontag
The aim of art is to reveal and to evoke vision.
I indicate indirectly that art is not an object, but art is an experience.
– Josef Albers
From Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim At Tinker Creek":
At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairie on fire was a well-known signal that meant “Come down to the water.” It was an extravagant gesture but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
It is the beauty within us that makes it possible to recognize the beauty around us.
The question is not what you look at but what you see.
–Thoreau
There is almost always a gap in time — however infinitesimal it may seem — between seeing and comprehending.
That moment just before we file a perception away into a conventional category, when our senses and minds are fully alert to what lies before us — that is the sweet spot of art.
– Ken Johnson, NY TIMES
Musician Herb Alpert reflects upon what he's trying to accomplish when he plays, and this sentiment is applicable to all creative endeavors:
There are lots of artists who try to impress other musicians with their playing.
They’ll play these dizzying things, and you say, ‘Wow that’s fabulous!’
But is it touching anyone?
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.
If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it.
Your life will be impoverished.
But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life."
Frank Lloyd Wright