You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all. – Ray Bradbury

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all. – Neil Gaiman

He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist. – Francis of Assisi

He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist. – Francis of Assisi

You know how writers are… they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves. – Orson Scott Card

…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough? – Vincent van Gogh

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire. – Slavoj Žižek

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious. – John Irving

Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it. – Frank Zappa

life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one – Stella Adler