A Quote by Paul Kurtz

We are not simply intellectual creatures. We wish to make love, to enjoy a gourmet dinner, to jog in the park, to cheer lustily at a ball game, to engage in spirited conversation with our friends, to play bridge or tennis, travel to exotic places, struggle with others to build a better world, and to enjoy the arts. The arts are so vital because they help to make life worth living. Music, poetry, literature, paintings, dance, and the theater are among our richest joys...The fine arts contribute immeasurably to the good life and that is why we cherish them.

Paul Kurtz

Quote Topics

Among Arts Ball Ball Game Because Better Better World Bridge Build Cheer Cherish Contribute Conversation Creatures Dance Dinner Engage Enjoy Exotic Exotic Places Fine Fine Art Fine Arts Friends Game Good Good Life Gourmet Help Intellectual Joys Life Life Worth Living Literature Living Love Make Music Others Our Paintings Park Places Play Poetry Richest Simply Spirited Struggle Tennis Theater Them Travel Vital Why Wish World Worth Worth Living

Quote Author

Paul Kurtz
American - Philosopher
December 21, 1925 - October 20, 2012

In life, we have two segments: arts and science. We need science to make our lives easier. But what do we live for? We enjoy life through arts. So it's an artistes duty to question the wrongs happening in the society.

Pankaj Tripathi

The arts are what makes life worth living. You've got food, you've got shelter, yeah. But the things that make you laugh, make you cry, make you connect - make you love are communicated through the arts. They aren't extras.

Barack Obama

The arts are not a frill. The arts are a response to our individuality and our nature, and help to shape our identity. What is there that can transcend deep difference and stubborn divisions? The arts. They have a wonderful universality. Art has the potential to unify. It can speak in many languages without a translator. The arts do not discriminate. The arts lift us up.

Barbara Jordan

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.

Brian Boyd

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.

Gerard van der Leeuw

The arts, instead of quaking along the periphery of our policy concerns, must push boldly into the core of policy. The arts are a response to our individuality and our nature and help to shape our identity. The arts are not a frill and should not be treated as such. They have the potential to become the driving force for healing division and divisiveness.

Barbara Jordan

There's the inherent value of the arts in terms of what that does for the quality of life and culture. The arts - in my case theater, play-writing - is all about community.

Robert Schenkkan

All of us here in Los Angeles, because we've had some success as a result of our life in the arts, need to get on board with helping L.A. Unified, the public school system, really reach the mandate to make arts part of the Common Core curriculum.

Monica Horan

Throughout history, the arts and humanities have helped men and women around the globe grapple with the most challenging questions and come to know the most basic truths. In our increasingly interconnected world, the arts play an important role in both shaping the character that defines us and reminding us of our shared humanity. This month, we celebrate our Nation's arts and humanities, and we recommit to ensuring all Americans can access and experience them.

Barack Obama

I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.

David McCullough

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

Mary Oliver

Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science ... Interpretation is the logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts. The arts ... also nourish our craving for the mystical.

E. O. Wilson

One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren't a way to make a living.

Kurt Vonnegut

The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet.

Melvyn Bragg

I'm sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn't make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.