"If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?"

"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh... beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy... and ideas are bulletproof."

"A few years ago, very few teenagers wore masks. But many wear them today and the numbers are increasingly very rapidly. The reason is that these teenagers are looking for something to hide behind. They are constantly having to communicate with friends via SMS and emails and this is making them so tired that it is a relief to wear a masks. It is a way to hide their feelings."

"One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that those beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself."

"Every one who, with intent to commit an indictable offence, has his face masked or coloured or is otherwise disguised is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years"

"Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them — the one, in fact, which is not a mask."

"Bane: No one cared who I was 'til I put on the mask."

"We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!"

"Truth is naked. Truth was, is, and will ever be. But we humans like to wear masks."

"Cultural products which present women who do not want to be household slaves or universal mothers or sex objects as bitches or sexual failures objectively aid male supremacy."

"Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen."

"Cultural products that present people who have no money or power as innately stupid or depraved, and thus unworthy of money or power, are in the interests of the ruling class and the power structure as it stands."

"Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them."

"Under the impulse of such ideas [upon which an Acquisitive Society is based] men do not become religious or wise or artistic; for religion and wisdom and art imply the acceptance of limitations. But they become powerful and rich. They inherit the earth and change the face of nature, if they do not possess their own souls; and they have that appearance of freedom which consists in the absence of obstacles between opportunities for self-advancement and those whom birth or wealth or talent or good fortune has placed in a position to seize them."

"Instead of supposing that a work of art must be something that all can behold—a poem, a painting, a book, a great building—consider making your own life a work of art. You have yourself to begin with, and a time of uncertain duration to work on it....It need not be something spectacular or even something that will attract notice from others. What it will be is a kind of excellence that you project for yourself, and then attain—something that you can take a look at, with honest self-appraisal, and be proud of."

"In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of effective communication between people."

"Cultural products which present foreign wars as the heroic effort of a master race to ennoble mankind are, to the degree they are successful as art, objectively in the interests of imperialists, who are people who make foreign wars against other races for profit."

"Revolution in art is in no way connected with class revolution. Artists are members of a privileged class. Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that it is absurdly overrated by everyone else."

"When the strongest began to fight for the tribe, and the fastest to hunt, it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjured the intelligence out of the appetites."

"Wars are fought to make the world safe for artists. It is never quite put in those terms but it is a useful way of grasping what civilized ideals are all about. The easiest way of knowing whether good has triumphed over evil is to examine the freedom of the artist."

"I believe that art is the greatest outcome of imitating nature, as Greek philosopher Aristotle once said. ... We take it for granted that in traditional arts and culture an artist develops his skill and aesthetics by imitating a master or by repeating a motif. The Japanese word “nazorae,” which means simulation or transformable imitation, sums up the quintessential strength of Japanese traditional art to achieve ultimate beauty."

"There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life."

"If you can't spontaneously detect (without analyzing) the difference between the sacred and profane, you'll never know what religion means. You will also never figure out what we commonly call art. You will never understand anything."

"The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal."

"We create art to express our perception as to what is not visible in nature. There is no past or future in art…. art should always be in the present!"

"Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls."

"“Isn’t that what art is?…Making things up?” “No,” she said. “That is commerce—identifying a market and satisfying it. Art is seeing the truth and revealing it, as beautifully and forcefully and honestly as you are able.”"

"I've fought the good fight. And now it’s all over, there's an indescribable peace. ...I believe in Michelangelo, Velásquez and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen."

"Art is the signature of civilizations."

"It [art] communicates directly without asking approval of any authority. Its values are not those of set virtues, but are of the essential nature of man, good or bad. Art is one of the few media of expression which still remains unedited, unprocessed, and undictated. If its hazards are great, so are its potentialities magnificent."

"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow."

"The very first moment when I realized what abstract art is, was the moment when my father came to my exhibition and he said: – Okay, but where are the pictures?"

"His art with nature's workmanship at strife, As if the dead the living should exceed."

"I want no more than to speak simply to be granted that grace. Because we've loaded our songs with so much music that they're slowly sinking and we've decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold and it's time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail. ...I think so much these days about the great river, that symbol which moves forward among herbs and greenery and beasts that graze and drink, and men who sow and harvest, great tombs even and small habitations of the dead. That current which goes its way and which is not so different from the blood of men..."

"Omnis ars naturae imitatio est."

"In the largest sense, every work of art is protest. … A lullaby is a propaganda song and any three-year-old knows it. … A hymn is a controversial song — sing one in the wrong church: you'll find out. ..."

"Illa maximi medicorum exclamatio est, Vitam brevem esse, longam artem."

"it is always in the future that the course of art lies"

"Take it easy. It’s just a drawing."

"After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations."

"Art happens all the time, everywhere. All we have to do is to keep our minds open."

"Schwer ist die Kunst, vergänglich ist ihr Preis."

"The law of simplicity and naïvety holds good of all fine art; for it is quite possible to be at once simple and sublime. True brevity of expression consists in everywhere saying only what is worth saying, and in avoiding tedious detail about things which everyone can supply for himself. This involves correct discrimination between what is necessary and what is superfluous. A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear..."

"Kunst ist die rechte Hand der Natur. Diese hat nur Geschöpfe, jene hat Menschen gemacht."

"[E]verything which a man fails to pursue for its own sake is but half-pursued; and true excellence... can be attained only where... produced for its own sake alone, and not as a means to further ends. ...[N]o one will ever succeed in doing anything really great and original... who does not seek to acquire knowledge for himself, and... decline to trouble himself about the knowledge of others... [E]rudition means endowing... with a great mass of alien thought... So we find Sterne in his Tristram Shandy, boldly asserting that an ounce of a man's own wit is worth a ton of other people's. ...[T]he most profound erudition is no more akin to genius than a collection of dried plants is like Nature, with its constant flow of new life, ever fresh, ever young, ever changing. There are no two things more opposed than the childish naïvety of an ancient author and the learning of his commentator."

"In a field of ripening corn I came to a place which had been trampled down by some ruthless foot; and as I glanced amongst the countless stalks, every one of them alike, standing there so erect and bearing the full weight of the ear, I saw a multitude of different flowers, red and blue and violet. How pretty they looked as they grew there so naturally with their little foliage! But, thought I, they are quite useless; they bear no fruit; they are mere weeds, suffered to remain only because there is no getting rid of them. And yet, but for these flowers, there would be nothing to charm the eye in that wilderness of stalks. They are emblematic of poetry and art, which, in civic life—so severe, but still useful and not without its fruit—play the same part as flowers in the corn."

"Von der Freiheit gesäugt wachsen die Künste der Lust."

"It holds up in one object or one surface, in one bright, luminous and concentrated thing — whether a beer can or a flag — all the dispersed elements that go to make up our lives."

"The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies."