Top 100 The Spectator Quotes
#1. There are two aspects," Alexey Alexandrovitch resumed: "those who take part and those who look on; and love for such spectacles is an unmistakable proof of a low degree of development in the spectator, I admit, but ...
Leo Tolstoy
#2. Politics, life, and business are not spectator sports. You have to get involved to get ahead. Most importantly, when you reach that level of success, keep the door open and the ladder down for others to follow.
Ron Brown
#3. Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
#4. A true artist should have no secrets. On the stage, you must be able to transmit every emotion to the spectator.
Anna Pavlova
#5. The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.
Max Ernst
#6. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.
Bruno Dumont
#7. In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.
Andy Goldsworthy
#8. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
Oscar Wilde
#9. I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.
Marcel Duchamp
#10. In conclusion, the idea of direction on the part of the photographer has its greatest value when its processes are least discernible to the spectator.
Arthur Rothstein
#12. To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. I
Oscar Wilde
#13. Unlike my esteemed colleague Garry Kasparov, I don't restrict the strength of opposition to Elo <2000, as fly-swatting makes poor spectator sport. (on simultaneous exhibitions)
Nigel Short
#14. A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
Eugene Delacroix
#15. In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
#16. Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.
Ansel Adams
#17. Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.
Clement Greenberg
#18. How could I remain a spectator while Singapore faces such complex challenges? How could I not step forward when I know I have more to contribute to the country we all worked to build?
Tony Tan
#19. A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
Alain De Botton
#20. I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.
Galen Rowell
#21. Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game
Edward Abbey
#22. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.
Christopher Hitchens
#23. It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures his existence.
Jim Morrison
#24. Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.
Bruno Dumont
#25. Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.
Diane Ravitch
#26. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.
Oscar Wilde
#27. Nearly always, so as to live at peace with ourselves, we disguise our own impotence and weakness as calculation and policy; it is our way of placating that half of our being which is in a sense a spectator of the other.
Benjamin Constant
#28. Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.
Louis Menand
#29. I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.
Ann Coulter
#30. The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator's mind.
Okakura Kakuzo
#31. So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#32. I think in space or music or art or literature of any kind there has to be some kind of void where the viewer or the spectator or the listener or the reader can insert themselves into it, and there is a certain kind of architectural space which is totalitarian, which does not allow you to do that.
Jonathan Meades
#33. If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.
Manuel Puig
#34. Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
John Berger
#35. Life is too precious to be a spectator sport. We are no longer merely fans, rooting for the winning team. We are the team. We are the grown-ups. Whatever you believe is true, now is the time to give your respectful, inquisitive, and compassionate self to it.
Vicki Robin
#36. For me the whole world is like a gigantic theater in which I am the only spectator without opera glasses. The orchestra plays the prelude to the third act, the stage is far away as in a dream, my heart swells with delight - and you want to blind me with a pair of half-ruble spectacles?
Isaac Babel
#38. Improv Everywhere tramples the lines drawn between spectacle and spectator, theatre and real life, public and private, performance and protest, and reclaims the streets for ordinary people.
Lyn Gardner
#39. For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment. Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment ... Nothing is immune from the demand that boredom be relieved (but without personal involvement, for mass society is a spectator society).
Merold Westphal
#40. You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#41. You keep meaning to cultivate an expertise in spectator sport. More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country.
Jay McInerney
#42. A mirror does not exist by itself. A mirror is a half. Half is done by the piece. The other half has to be done by the beholder. You need to be the half to see what you're looking for, so the mirror can exist. As you should do with other persons.
Cristiane Serruya
#43. The duty of a film director is to focus more on the soul of the spectator.
Ken Loach
#44. Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In 1966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."1 Although
Neil Postman
#45. The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.
Roman Vishniac
#46. I spoke to the 'Wine Spectator' because that's PR; that's how you sell wine.
Alain Wertheimer
#47. Dont be a life spectator.. take the plunge.
Max McKeown
#48. The stakes ... are too high for government to be a spectator sport.
Barbara Jordan
#49. Perhaps future space probes will be plastered in commercial logos, just as Formula One cars are now. Perhaps Robot Wars in space will be a lucrative spectator sport. If humans venture back to the moon, and even beyond, they may carry commercial insignia rather than national flags.
Martin Rees
#50. Being a spectator of calamities taking place in an other country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.
Sontag, Susan
#51. The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
E. M. Forster
#52. From the moment you become a spectator, everything is downhill. It is a life that ends before the cheering and the shouting die.
George Sheehan
#53. At lucky moments this emanation could overwhelm the spectator in such a way, that because of all sorts of associations in his thinking, he could finally be taken to those areas which also had moved me so deeply and made me think I should draw the attention of others to it.
Antoni Tapies
#54. Gambling houses are temples where the most sordid and turbulent passions contend; there no spectator can be indifferent. A card or a small square of ivory interests more than the loss of an empire, or the ruin of an unoffending group of infants, and their nearest relatives.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#55. Will an intelligent spectator not admire the prodigeous structures of Stone-Henge because he does not know by what law of mechanics they were raised?
Elizabeth Montagu
#56. Be the player in your own dream life. Don't be a spectator watching your dreams every day; Let them get going!
Israelmore Ayivor
#57. I could not have climbed any mountains while looking from the ground ... I would not have flown ... or dived ... or surfed ... or swum ... I am not a tourist nor a spectator ... this is the life I have left, and I will not waste it like some rubber-neck
Kem
#58. As a spectator I witnessed the applause given to the performer, so I decided to be the performer.
Amit Kalantri
#59. I think my younger self would be more amazed to know I was doing an interview for 'The Spectator.'
Gary Kemp
#60. I watch fights and I often feel morally compromised by it. I feel like I'm morally culpable for what's occurring because I'm the spectator and ultimately footing the bill for the spectacle.
Jonathan Gottschall
#61. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
Barnett Newman
#63. The sight of a being who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator. Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant
#64. The process of drawing is ... the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of visual thought. Unlike painting and sculpture ... the artist makes clear to himself and not to the spectator what he is doing. It is a soliloquy before it becomes communication.
Michael Ayrton
#65. All that a spectator gets out of the game is fresh air, the comical articles in his program, the sight of twenty-two young men rushing about in mysterious formations, and whatever he brought in his flask.
Robert Benchley
#66. In the actual condition of medical science, the physician mostly plays the part of simple spectator of the sad episodes which his profession furnishes him.
Francois Magendie
#68. The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
John Berger
#69. Emily Zanotti is a Republican political strategist and author. She is a regular contributor to The American Spectator and a featured opinion columnist with The Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared across the political spectrum, in National Review, The Daily Caller, Slate, and elsewhere.
Joanne Bamberger
#70. An image means nothing. It is just a door, leading to the next door. It will never happen that we will find the truth we are looking for just in an image; it will happen behind the last door that the spectator discovers the truth, because of his own efforts.
Antoni Tapies
#71. Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#72. To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires ... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.
Michael Snow
#73. The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.
Lawren Harris
#74. Both cinematic culture and the culture at large have changed profoundly. We're now in post-cinematic digital culture, and the internet has obviously usurped movies, which are no longer central to our lives, at least not as a collective spectator experience.
Masha Tupitsyn
#75. The sight of a being who is not graced by any touch of a pure and good will but who yet enjoys an uninterrupted prosperity can never delight a rational and impartial spectator. Thus a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of being even worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant
#76. The more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.
Bruno Dumont
#77. I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.
J.G. Ballard
#78. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde
#79. Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
Wendell Phillips
#80. she could begin again and not become so entangled in this long, horrible war, would she watch from the sidelines as a spectator this time? Would she choose differently, take fewer risks? Caroline
Austin, Lynn
#81. One has been a poor spectator of life if one has not witnessed the hand - that kills from mercy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#82. I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.
Frederik Pohl
#83. When you pursue your goals with passion, you will attract people who love you; but you'll also attract haters. I'm okay with that; I welcome it. I don't want to live life as a spectator. I've learned that if no one is cheering you on and/or booing you; it means you're not in the game.
Steve Maraboli
#84. Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life.
Joseph Addison
#85. Chess will always be in the doldrums as a spectator sport while a draw is given equal mathematical value as a decisive result.
Michael Basman
#86. Don't be a spectator in the kingdom of God , find something that you can do , at-least even going to church is one of them
Alinani Joe
#87. I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that's never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#88. Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.
Aime Cesaire
#89. I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.
Michael Haneke
#90. His body walks out onto the darkened stage , and a roar goes up from the crowd. He stands in front of the mic, and he can feel his face twist in a sneer-the Elvis sneer from his dreams-though he never told it to move. He is powerless now, a spectator at his own moment of glory.
Joseph Garraty
#91. There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator.
Alain Resnais
#92. I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I'm also a poet and have had work in the 'Spectator.'
Maurice Flanagan
#93. You are either a player or a spectator! Players influence the game while spectators watch them to do it. Such is life!
Israelmore Ayivor
#94. A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.
Henri Matisse
#95. Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.
Charles Simic
#96. Even as a spectator, beer tastings and festivals are just about the best way to learn about - and enjoy - beer. Many of the events in
Randy Mosher
#97. What really matters for me is ... the more active role of the observer in quantum physics ... According to quantum physics the observer has indeed a new relation to the physical events around him in comparison with the classical observer, who is merely a spectator.
Wolfgang Pauli
#98. The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]
Elizabeth Bowen
#99. Rule One: Whenever a spectator seeks out a really good vantage point and settles down on shooting stick or canvas chair, the tallest and fattest golf watcher on the course will take up station directly in front.
Peter Dobereiner
#100. Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.
Antonin Artaud
