A Quote by Milan Kundera

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Czechoslovakian - Writer
Born: April 1, 1929

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Milan Kundera

There is a metaphysical honour in ending the world's absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.... War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. "Art and nothing but art", said Nietzsche, "we have art in order not to die of the truth."

Albert Camus

We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?

Norman Mailer

Imagination helps you to recognize the reality of facts, but then to go beyond them, to penetrate beneath them, to rise above them in your search for creative answers to problems. Imagination "stirs up the gift of God in thee." Through your imagination you touch and express the inspiration of the Infinite. Imagination, in the words of Shakespeare, "gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." You reach into the heavens to grasp an idea, then you bring it down to earth and make it work.

Wilferd Peterson

Don't tell me about heaven. What about in this life, that there is a better way, that this is not in vain, that it is not Edward Albee or Camus's absurd, the theater of the absurd, it is not Shakespeare - "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" - that life has meaning and that God is still in control, and that God can, and God will, so people of goodwill, working hard, do something about the situation? We can change.

Jeremiah Wright

To reach only for that which pleasantly enchants you is the least of imagination, if even imagination at all, by the obvious reality of remaining within your means. The greater of imagination is parallel to risk. It extends beyond your comfort zone or haven, or sense of beauty, or what you personally believe suits you in exploration of what may not.

Criss Jami

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

Helen Keller

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

Mark Twain

No matter how much creativity goes into it, cooking is an art. Or perhaps I should say a craft. It abides by absolute rules, physics, chemistry, etc. and that means that unless you understand the science you cannot reach the art. We're not talking about painting here. Cooking's more like engineering. I happen to think that there is great beauty in great engineering.

Alton Brown

Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that's about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that's about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart.

LL Cool J

It is a truism that as long as man loves but himself and his art he can never attain to the full measure of manhood or reach the sublimest heights of his art. He must seek to love men as brothers and art, not for the sake of art itself, but art as a means toward bringing all men up to that verdant plateau where their souls may be fed in very rejoicing in all that is true, beautiful, and abiding.

Percy Jewett Burrell

Art makes people do a double take and then, if they're looking at the picture, maybe they'll read the text under it that says, "Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday." I've been operating that way ever since - that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

Eric Drooker

The power of imagination is the ultimate creative power.. no doubt about that. While knowledge defines all we currently know and understand.. imagination points to all we might yet discover and create. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions

Albert Einstein

Stand-up is an art but since it's humor and it's funny - a lot of guys that don't think it's art are probably coming from the angle that they don't want to take it so seriously. I've always looked at it as an art but I don't look at it as a pretentious art. I understand it has to be taken lightly because it is just comedy in the end, but the good stand-up comics are someone with something to say.

Mitch Hedberg

The imagination is the vehicle of sensibility. Transported by the imagination, we attain life, life itself, which is absolute art.

Yves Klein

What is it that we in the theatre give? Instead of images on canvas or in the form of statuary or music, we give our body, voice, feelings, will, imagination — we give a form of pulsating art to life itself; we give it to our characters and we give it to our audiences. Nothing, absolutely nothing remains for us save the pleasure of having given pleasure.

Michael Chekhov

A Quote by Milan Kundera

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