A Quote by Theodore Bikel

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

Theodore Bikel

Quote Topics

Art Humankind Language Past

Quote Author

Theodore Bikel
Austrian - Actor
May 2, 1924 - July 21, 2015

Infancy is the realm conveyed to us in dreams which look backward to the past. Adolescence, more like a work of art, is a prospective symbol of personal synthesis and of the future of humankind. Like a work of art that sets us on the pathway to new discoveries, adolescence promotes new meanings by mobilizing energies that were initially invested in the past.

Louise J. Kaplan

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Susan Sontag

Literature rests on language. It is a linguistic art. So it cannot sever its relationship with the past. But it can create new methods and styles that differ in structure, form, and content from the past.

Simin Behbahani

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

William Faulkner

Language is inherently not concerned with logic. As an expression of the psychological activities of humankind, it simply follows a linear process as it seeks actualisation. Moreover, it does not obey the objective concepts of time and space that belong to the physical world. When the discussion of time and space is imported into linguistic art from scientific aims and research methods, that linguistic art is entirely reduced to trifling pseudo-philosophical issues.

Gao Xingjian

If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself.

Harold Rosenberg

To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.

Pablo Picasso

I learned how to incorporate heirloom furniture, artwork and objects d'art to work with exciting new contemporary pieces.

Hilary Farr

It's just like heirloom tomatoes; this is heirloom music. We used to have all kinds of diversity in our poultry, in our vegetables, in our fruits, and slowly but surely the monoculture beast comes in. I'm saying that's not a good idea. And if it means that I gotta do it on my own, then I do it on my own.

Taj Mahal

Since 'concepts' are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.

Henry Flynt

Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.

Joyce Carol Oates

Art is a way you discover the past, and so it brings the past into the present and the future. That's why we have anthropologists who dig up the art from the past. You can see the refinement in the society by the art. And people will see our lack of refinement when they dig up our art.

Pat Steir

Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection.

Richard Leakey

The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.