Quotes About Arts

The dance is the most universal of the arts, since, as Goethe justly said, it could destroy all the fine arts. It is an expression of all the emotions of the spirit, from the lowest to the highest. It accompanies and stimulates all the processes of life, from hunting and farming to war and fertility, from love to death. It enables, in turn other arts to come into being: music, song, drama. Despite all their riches, the dance is no formless complex, but a simple unity.

A lot of people don't realize, when you are acting in a martial arts film, you're not just performing martial arts. You're not just performing martial arts. You're actually acting as much as any other actor.

I was raised on piano and saxophone and jazz music for ten or twelve years. Before I even picked up a bass. My whole family has always pushed the arts, you know? My brother is a doctor of music and my cousin is an opera singer over in Austria. Arts were always a big thing in our family.

I've danced my whole life. Martial arts is just fun for me, it's all choreographed a bit like dance. I have done Muay Thai and Wushu, which is cool because it's very fluid dance. I also do Tricking. It's kind of like Taekwondo with the big kicks and flips and showier aspects of martial arts.

My mother was a high school arts teacher, so I was always surrounded by the arts

You know, I went to Oberlin. At that time, grades were - you elected to have them or not. It was all of that era where grades were out the window. But I did very well in school. I didn't really study the arts; I practiced the arts.

The saying 'the arts aid the body' is for samurai of other regions. For samurai of the Nabeshima clan the arts bring ruin to the body.

I was very prejudiced when I started arts school. I, like all of those kids, was like, "I don't like this modern stuff." I came to arts school with a very stupid, conservative set of ideas about art.

Icon. What is an icon? When someone is iconic it means they have established a certain kind of legacy possibly, and I think it does come with time. It's something in the arts, I feel. Maybe not, maybe it doesn't have to be in the arts exactly. I'm not really sure. But I don't think you are born an icon.

Martial arts has been a way of life for me since I was a young kid. It created a discipline and respect for everything. Martial arts has just made me a better person. It's a way of life.

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.

The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts.

If you look at things that really affect people's lives - sport, the arts, charities - they were always at the back of the queue for government money - health, social security, defence, pensions were all way ahead. And each of those areas - sports, the arts, the lottery - got relatively petty cash from the government.

Everything around you can use. It's like your tools and your material. Whether it's in performing arts like dance, or visual arts, or poetry, a lot of those elements can come and help you, can trigger your creativity. But you have to be open, be aware, and you have to be ready to look.

I'm a sworn enemy of convention. I despite the conventional in anything, even the arts. I paint canvasses on the floor and drove one art teacher out of his mind. But that's just the way I paint best.

The arts in America exist in spite of America, not because of America.

I think the arts are very important for children growing up.

We are lucky in the United States to have our liberal arts system. In most countries, if you go to university, you have to decide for all English literature or no literature, all philosophy or no philosophy. But we have a system that is one part general education and one part specialization. If your parents say you've got to major in computer science, you can do that. But you can also take general education courses in the humanities, and usually you have to.

I can truthfully say, in arts I have pretty much seen and done it all and, at my age, I have no patience with wide-eyed artists fooling themselves about their place in history. We should know by now that it is the whim of the elite few who set the rules... those who have fooled themselves into believing that they are God's gift to the ages.

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts.

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.

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

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

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

In hindsight I can see that my love for the arts began by watching my father and his colleagues perform on stage in Jamaica, and running a muck among the exhibits of fabulous Jamaican art at the National Gallery while mum was upstairs curating.

If classical music is the state of the art, then the arts are in a sad state.

In Europe, people in the arts are considered part of the intelligentsia; they are considered part of the elite

I went to school to play sports, but I got involved in theatre in college kind of by mistake. I ended up taking an acting class almost just to get rid of an arts requirement, but I wound up in this wonderful acting class with this teacher named Alma Becker who really saved my life. I was just kind of this knucklehead kid from DC and I was in and out of trouble all of the time. I took a theatre class and she really discovered something in me and I absolutely fell in love with it.

The world is a complicated place, and there's a lot of division between people. The performing arts tend to unify people in a way nothing else does.

I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.

Usually action films have a formula: good guy gets in trouble, his wife dies, friends have problems, so he goes to the mountain, learns martial arts, comes back, and kills the bad guy.

Creativity in all forms of life, from arts to business to domestic situations, depends on our ability to recognize and explore gaps

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

I was a jock, hardcore sports all the way down the line, but I heard that if you auditioned for this arts school, you got time off school, and that sounded good to me.

In Old Europe and Ancient Crete, women were respected for their roles in the discovery of agriculture and for inventing the arts of weaving and pottery making.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

It's important to go against the grain. My favorite celebrity, across arts and sports and everything, is Muhammad Ali. And he was famous for speaking inflammatory things that were polarizing but also were important to building who he was as a man and his legacy. And in the end, he was right about most of the s... he was talkin' about.

I wanted to show that an African-American artist could make it in this country on a national level in the graphic arts. I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans.

I had a great year with Bob Mintzer [at Laguardia School of Arts]. Bob is great. We could have just brought the clarinet or dealt with classical stuff, or brought the flute or just dealt with comp and arranging... what a great teacher.

A Bachelor of Arts is one who makes love to a lot of women, and yet has the art to remain a bachelor.

The short story ... is the most democratic of all the arts; anyone may tell a story, and if it is an absorbing one someone will listen.

I studied acting for 10 years before I went for an audition. I studied with Lee Strasberg and Actors Studio teachers, and went to the High School of Performing Arts.

At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility.

When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future: when I behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries hence arising,--I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.

I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

Some of our most powerful works of art have been produced by older Americans-by hands that have engaged in years of hard work, eyes that have witnessed decades of change, and hearts that have felt a lifetime of emotions. Our whole society benefits when older Americans use their talents and experiences to become involved in the arts as creators, teachers, mentors, volunteers, and audiences.

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians