The artist's responsibility is to make people feel the beauty of the world.

-  Tarkovsky

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

- Wittgenstein

Art is a prayer. It's my prayer. And if my prayer becomes a prayer for others, then my art becomes intimately others

- Andrei Tarkosky

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.

-  William Blake

From music people accept pure emotion, but from painting people expect explanation.

- Agnes Martin

poems are not made out of ideas, they are made out of words

- Stéphane Mallarmé

All art aspires to the condition of music.

- Walter Pater

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

- Wittgenstein

To explain a work of art is a bad idea.

To be explained by a work of art is worse.

- Jamshid Mir Fenderesky

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

- Plutarch

The only solution for art to be appreciated by more people is what the Orientals have understood, especially in Japan. They are educated in sensitivity from birth to death, making them understand that they can raise the level and make a work of art out of eveything. 

- Antoni Tàpies

In general I am especially attracted to artists in whom I discover some common features between art and religion, when in their works one can recognise a sacred idea, a deep penetration. That's why I'm so passionate about the art of the Far East, and especailly the Buddhist art of the Chan or Zen branch. 

- Antoni Tàpies

Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble.

- Giorgio Morandi

We will never know a work’s true meaning. It’s helpful to remember there are forces at work beyond our comprehension. Let’s make art and let the others make the stories.

- Rick Rubin 

Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Art is art. Everything else is everything else.

- Ad Reinhardt

Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn’t have to answer for his meanings. I don’t think so deeply about my work — I don’t know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch to pieces, it doesn’t work. Similarly with a work of art, there’s no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

- Andrei Tarkovsky

It is not in the role of an artist to worry about life — to feel responsible for creating a better world. This is a very serious distraction. All of your conditioning has been directed toward intellectual living. This is useless in art work. All human knowedge is useless in art work. Concepts, relationships, categories, classifications, deductions are distractions of mind that we wish to hold free for inspiration …
The way of an artist is an entirely different way. It is a way of surrender. He must surrender to his own mind.

- Agnes Martin

I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

from ' Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'

- Robert Pirsig

“I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh,” she said, "well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?” 

And so I pretended not to hear her. And went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I'll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. 

The moral of the story is - we're here on Earth to fart around.

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don't realise, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it's like we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Let's all get up and move around a bit right now...or at least dance.”

- Kurt Vonnegut

"...interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."

- Susan Sontag