Quotes About Immortality Of Art

“An artist is the magician put among men to gratify
capriciously
their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships
and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes
husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer ...”

— Tom Stoppard

“Religion, philosophy, art - those three pillars on which the world has rested-were invented by man in order symbolically to encapsulate the idea of infinity, setting against it a symbol of its possible attainment (which in real terms is of-course impossible). Humanity has found nothing else on such an enormous scale. Admittedly man found it by instinct, without understanding why he needed God (easier that way!) or philosophy (explains everything, even the meaning of life!) or art (immortality).”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“Immortality, thou art a chimerical bridesmaid of life.”

— Aporva Kala

“In Jung's terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist's own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can't get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation.”

— Ernest Becker

“I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve ... I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie”

— Jack London

“From each art practiced in its time I derive a knowledge which compensates me in part for pleasures lost. I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such sympathy would be one of the least revocable kinds of immortality.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“You know, also I, you know, I was on those birth control pills and my breasts were like, they hurt ... and, you know, it was like they blew up like. You know, they wouldn't fit into any of my dresses. I had to quit taking those birth control pills ... This was like - I mean they were like, I thought they should be photographed really ... So they were, for immortality. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)”

— Eve Babitz

“The immortality of great art seems bound up with the inevitable loss of its original surface meaning and its rebirth in the spirit of every new age.”

— Anton Ehrenzweig

“Of all the wonders that the world had to offer, only art promised immortality.”

— Sergei Diaghilev

“I don't buy art in order to leave a mark or to be remembered; clutching at immortality is of zero interest to anyone sane.”

— Charles Saatchi

“The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.”

— Andre Malraux

“Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.”

— James Thurber

“In sanskrit they say: "Tat twam asi" - thou art that. You are God. The bubble of your awareness bursts and you're flooded with immortality.”

— Frederick Lenz

“That's one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing's real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection-none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it's not much help to Truffaut.”

— Woody Allen

“Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.”

— Damien Hirst

“Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality ...”

— Damien Hirst

“Love is the only bow of life's dark cloud. It is the Morning and Evening Star. It shines upon the cradle of the babe, and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb. It is the Mother of Art, inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home, kinder of every fire on every hearth, it was the first dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to joy, and makes right royal kings of common clay ...”

— Robert Green Ingersoll