It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good… Art can only give food — a jolt — the occasion — for psychical experience. . Andrei Tarkovsky
About This Quote

Art should be judged by what it does to the human soul. This quote from the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant, gives us a sense of how art can actually make a person better. When an artist creates a piece of art, he is able to express something that might have been difficult to figure out through other means. Art makes a person think about their lives and what they need to do to be a better person. When a person is able to see themselves through the eyes of a great artist, they can see what needs to be changed within them and decide to change it.

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  3. Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep. - Clive Barker
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More Quotes By Andrei Tarkovsky
  1. In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.
  2. No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision, and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time.
  3. A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.
  4. It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed...
  5. Masterpieces, not always distinguished or distinguishable among all the works with pretensions to genius, are scattered about the world like warning notices in a mine field.
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