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"We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . ."

Tom Stoppard, English Dramatist

Art, Creativity, Observation, Truth

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"We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . ."

Exlpore more Art quotes

"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."

Ambrose Bierce, American Journalist

Art, Limitations, Thinking

"History develops, art stands still."

E. M. Forster, English Novelist

"To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job."

Simone de Beauvoir, French Writer

Art, Husband, Job

"You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet, because poetry is beyond hooks and holes."

M.F. Moonzajer, Afghan Author

Art, Poetry, Love, Emotion, Expression

"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."

Flannery O'Connor, American Author

"Music heals all forms of misery."

Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher

Art, Music, Healing, Comfort, Emotion

"Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."

Charles Baudelaire, French Poet

Art, Being, Modernity

"The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure."

George Bernard Shaw, Irish Dramatist

Art, Play, Success, Audience, Failure

"The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Art, Music, Experience, Truth, Life

"The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."

Leo Tolstoy, Russian Novelist

Art, Communication, Expression, Understanding

Explore more quotes by Tom Stoppard

"We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain."

"The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means."

"A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier."

"We're actors. We're the opposite of people."

"There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making a commitment is it. Finish. You think it sets like a concrete platform and it'll take any strain you want to put on it. You're committed. You don't have to prove anything. In fact you can afford a little neglect, indulge in a little bit of sarcasm here and there, isolate yourself when you want to. Underneath it's concrete for life. I'm a cow in some ways, but you're an idiot."

Relationship, Commitment, Responsibility, Reality, Truth

"For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge."

Ethics, Justice, Morality, Life

"I write out of my intellectual experience."

Creativity, Writing, Experience, Expression

"I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education."

Education, Importance, Learning, Culture

"Uncertainty is the normal state."

Philosophy, Uncertainty, Life, Reality

"The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists."

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