A Quote by Alain de Botton

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

Alain de Botton

Quote Topics

Art Greatest Knowing Speak Us Without Works Works Of Art

Quote Author

Alain de Botton
English - Writer
Born: December 20, 1969

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Roger Scruton

One of the greatest benefits of our salvation has to be that of hearing God speak to us personally. There can be no intimate relationship with our heavenly Father without it. But, as easy as it is for us to speak to Him, the average Christian has a hard time hearing His voice. This is not the way the Lord intended it to be.

Andrew Wommack

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Roger Scruton

We know great art by its effect on us. If we are prepared to look without preconceptions, without defenses, without haste, then art will change us.

Wendy Beckett

Many of the greatest works of philosophy seem to me to be valuable not because of their arguments, but because they offer us perspectives that open up new possibilities. They show us how we might start in different places, and not buy into the assumptions tacitly made on the first pages of the philosophical works that have influenced us.

Philip Kitcher

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.

Julio Cortazar

He works in us and with us, not against us or without us; so that his assistance is an encouragement to the facilitating of the work, and no occasion of neglect as to the work itself.

John Owen

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

Rebecca West

I'm not a culture snob. So while, of course, I think the Mozart 'Requiem' or, say, Beethoven's 'Ninth' are some of the greatest works of art in the history of humankind, that's not to say the Beatles or Queen or Simon and Garfunkel aren't brilliant, beautiful, important works of art that should be sung without a sense of irony.

Eric Whitacre

God never ceases to speak to us, but the noise of the world without and the tumult of our passions within bewilder us and prevent us from listening to him

Francois Fenelon

Do not let us speak of darker days, let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days-the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.

Winston Churchill

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Donald Barthelme

What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from . . . pure commodities? A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. . . works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies”, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.

Lewis Hyde

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

Terry Eagleton

I have always wanted my art to service my people - to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life.