Quotes About Arts

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.

Back in the Bruce Lee era, and in my era, Kung-Fu stirred up a kind of frenzy, and many people were learning martial arts from us. But about a decade ago, Hollywood began bringing in a number of our action choreographers, including two from my own stunt crew, where they became martial arts directors. Now, a decade later, Hollywood has learned it all, so when you look at the action films they're making now, they all use our action, our martial arts, and then add to that their own technology which is ten times better than ours, and it has to leave us dumbfounded: how did they film that?

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe. If you must go into the arts, go into them for yourself alone. On some basic level you must enjoy the act of doing it ... Otherwise, you are going to end up frustrated and unhappy. Recognition in the arts is luck and gravy.

In the visual arts, for example, the semiological approach to graphics provides a rigorous analysis of the visual means used by the artist. It defines the basic properties and laws governing the arts and suggests objective criteria for art criticism.

Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.

The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

I've done a lot of training in martial arts. I started out in warring tempo, I did sports jujitsu, and I've also practiced extreme martial arts.

I knew from a young age that I wanted to perform. I went to an arts camp called Brookdale Arts Camp, in New Jersey, from the time I was 6, and then I was a counselor there through high school.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

Virgil Thomson, the great classical music critic, who was also a composer, but said that criticism was the only antidote he knew to pay publicity. Critics at their best are independent voices people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers, I really do think of myself as a teacher. Newspapers that don't carry arts criticism at all while not fulfill this function. And probably their arts journalism will be deprived as a result.

I don't doubt that at the dawn of martial arts, the main goal was to beat up one's opponents in the most effective way possible. But then, indirectly, the alchemy of martial arts began to strike some chords deep within the spirit of many individuals, transforming living war-machines into poets, artists, and philosophers.

A dancer should learn from all the arts. Go to museums and look at the paintings. See how they balance things. Everything you do in the arts enriches you.

The arts tend to be more liberal. There tends to be more social relevance in the arts.

The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.

I've done all kinds of martial arts. I have my blackbelt in Shorei Ru. I'm doing Wu Shu. I do all kinds of different martial arts.

When the arts are eliminated, children get bored and tired of school. When the arts are included, children's imaginations are allowed to run wild.

Art is a funny thing. It's a communicative medium. It really is, and it works outside of literature, the movies, stage, it has its own realm. It's like when you say "The Arts," those are all the arts, dance, theater, ballet. So within that set of areas of expression, we have visual art and it is visual and it's about looking at something and seeing it in the light with our eyes, maybe touching it or not touching it, or wanting to touch it, not being able to touch it.

The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers; and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.

I think it's important to remember that an artist could be at the center of healing our problems because, every day, that's what we do. Every day, our job is to make something that wasn't there before. We're kind of built to go into situations that need a kind of fresh thought to solve them so I'm happy about that and I would encourage anyone with any problem in the world that needs to be solved to consider having any person in the creative arts be at the core of its solution. I think that's one of our unused or untapped values.

Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.

As a visual arts teacher, I have to keep my mind open. I have explores styles from pointillism to cubism.

New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

Everything too fast is not good but everything too slow is also not good. You need balance. That's why I like martial arts: it always tells you how to control your body, your mind, your heart. Balance. Balance can keep the world's peace. I think that's a very good thing.

Every art form changes, often at rates and in ways that cause discomfort to its devotees. But the arts also have a remarkable ability to withstand and absorb those changes, and to prove wrong the prophecies of their demise.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

One thing I am really dying to do, while I'm still young and in shape, is an action movie. I would love to do a Lara Croft type of thing that's really physical and tough. I want to have a gun and do martial arts. I would love to get paid to get into the best shape of my life.

jewels have played a colorful part in the evolution of world affairs. Because precious stones tend to inspire both admiration and greed, leaders have found convenient excuses for seeking them and have used them to impress crowds, reward friends, deprive foes, forge alliances, and justify war. Jewels may find their highest expression in the decorative arts, but they have also earned a place in the art of the possible.

When quite young I can remember I had no thought or wish of surpassing others. I was rather taken with a liking of little arts and bits of learning. My mother carefully fostered a liking for botany, giving me a small microscope and many books, which I yet have. Strange as it may seem, I now believe that botany and the natural system, by exercising discrimination of kinds, is the best of logical exercises. What I may do in logic is perhaps derived from that early attention to botany.

I am convinced that in the arts, committees are useless.

Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization.

Zhang Yimou tried to use martial arts to talk about Chinese culture, Chinese people. What do they think, what do they want and what do they hope.

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You're always helping people.

It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts.

In architecture as in all other operative arts, the end must direct the operation. The end is to build well. Well building has three conditions: Commodity, Firmness and Delight.

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

In sales, as in medicine, a prescription before diagnosis is a mistake in the arts.

Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.

Most of my training I do in between movies, and even if I wasn't an actor I'd be doing it. I started studying martial arts when I was 14, and it's something I still do just to keep sane and feel good about myself.

The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.

While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative....the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

The novel may be dead as a commercial form. When art forms things die as commercial forms, something happens to the practice of those arts that isn't very pleasant. It used to be that a poet like Tennyson could keep his house and his coach-and-four and his staff of six servants on the income from poetry. That doesn't happen anymore.

Some teachers should be put in prison for the way they either take advantage of women in their classes or destroy fragile egos. Be careful who you ask to help you when you're in the arts.

The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.

I went to the High School for Performing Arts, and to Howard University on a talent scholarship.

I would never want to write a character who was not thoroughly herself or himself. She's a very specific creature in my mind, and she has her thoughts, which range from skin to American history, philosophy, and the arts.