A Quote by John Grierson

Art is not a mirror but a hammer.

John Grierson

Quote Topics

Art Art Is Hammer Mirror

Quote Author

John Grierson
British - Director
April 26, 1898 - February 19, 1972

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.

Bertolt Brecht

Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer.

Bertolt Brecht

The song 'If I Had a Hammer' is geared toward people who don't have a hammer. Maybe before I had a hammer I thought I'd hammer in the morning and hammer in the evening. But once you get a hammer, you find you don't really hammer as much as you thought you would.

Ellen DeGeneres

Personally, I think government is a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build or you can use a hammer to destroy; there is nothing intrinsically good or evil about the hammer itself. It is the purposes to which it is put and the skill with which it is used that determine whether the hammer's work is good or bad.

Molly Ivins

It is not the job of art to mirror. Images reflected in a mirror appear to us in reverse. An artist's responsibility is to reveal consciousness; to produce a human document.

Squeak Carnwath

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

Aberjhani

Let Go of Your Worries Let go of your worries and be completely clear-hearted, like the face of a mirror that contains no images. If you want a clear mirror, behold yourself and see the shameless truth, which the mirror reflects. If metal can be polished to a mirror-like finish, what polishing might the mirror of the heart require? Between the mirror and the heart is this single difference: the heart conceals secrets, while the mirror does not.

Rumi

In 1956, the success of the Hammer films kick-started my career. That immediately gave me a name and a face to go with it. I will always be grateful to Hammer for that.

Christopher Lee

The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.

Montgomery Clift

Death teaches us to live; it gives us a boundary to map our living within. Death's hammer breaks through the mirror separating us from light.

David Meltzer

The purer the artist's 'mirror' is, the more true reality reflects in it. Overseeing the historical culture of art, we must conclude that the mirror only slowly is purified. Time producing this purifying shows a gradual, more constant and objective image of reality.

Piet Mondrian

We mystify the art of moviemaking, but it's not amystical science. You take a good screenplay, put a group togetherand you hammer it out.

Bill Paxton

Sometimes I feel like art is supposed to mirror life, but strangely it's as if art is trying to catch up to life, to a certain extent?

Tracee Ellis Ross

Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

Jeff Grubb

There was once a professor of law who said to his students. When you are fighting a case, if you have facts on your side hammer them into the jury, and if you have the law on your side hammer it into the judge. But if you have neither the facts nor the law, asked one of his listeners? Then hammer the hell into the table, answered the professor.