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. 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
#3. A true artist should have no secrets. On the stage, you must be able to transmit every emotion to the spectator.
Anna Pavlova
#4. 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
#5. The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune.
Bert Williams
#6. Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.
Paul Rand
#7. The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder. By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.
Alfred Sisley
#8. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
Oscar Wilde
#9. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#10. 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
#11. 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. The true work of art continues to unfold and create within the personality of the spectator. It is a continuous coming into being.
Mervyn Levy
#13. The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp
#14. David Blaine, I think, was the first TV magician to really turn the camera around and make it about the spectator's experience. That's really what magic is all about.
Michael Carbonaro
#15. To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. I
Oscar Wilde
#16. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.
Charles Baudelaire
#17. The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!
Augusto Boal
#18. No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
Kenneth Clark
#19. A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
Eugene Delacroix
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.
Francis Bacon
#24. What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.
Marc Chagall
#25. A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
Alain De Botton
#26. Your mind is like a parachute : it's no use unless it's open. -the Spectator, 1883
Samantha Cote
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The eyes sparked a lot of things for me, it could be somebody remembering something they had witnessed or heard about, or it could be the person in the photograph that was experiencing a tragedy or it could also be the spectator looking on from a safe distance.
Alex Prager
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#34. The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator's mind.
Okakura Kakuzo
#35. 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
#36. There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition - which means seeing things you're familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there's also hysterical laughter - a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us.
Michael Haneke
#37. My films require that the spectator ask the big existential questions. If you're not interested of turning inwards for answers, my films won't fulfill their whole purpose.
Lisa Langseth
#38. 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
#39. The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
John Berger
#40. 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
#41. It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's
Samuel R. Delany
#43. I don't paint women, I paint pictures ... What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.
Henri Matisse
#44. A genuine work of art usually displeases at first sight, as it suggests a deficiency in the spectator.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#45. 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
#46. Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
William Hazlitt
#47. The duty of a film director is to focus more on the soul of the spectator.
Ken Loach
#48. 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
#49. I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.'
Peter Ackroyd
#50. Humanity is a spectator sport. God is the spectator.
Forrest Carr
#51. For the spectator does not see space, he sees the objects and events; he does not perceive the coordinates with the same cyclopean eye of the camera. With his entire body, desires, and fantasies, he perceives the existential dimensions by which the world is organized.
Mikel Dufrenne
#52. Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.
Michael Haneke
#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. Beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who screams is not a dancing bear.
Aime Cesaire
#55. I think my younger self would be more amazed to know I was doing an interview for 'The Spectator.'
Gary Kemp
#56. 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
#57. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
Barnett Newman
#59. Ideally there is a type of continuum which flows from life through the artist's sensibility and his materials ... the concreteness of the object and its own life , through the spectator, with his expectations, interpretations, back into life.
Douglas Portway
#60. 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
#61. The way the knowledge of the spectator is drawn upon in constructing the scene, through the stylized performance, ritual motifs and auditory address that arise from a host of Indian aesthetic and performance traditions.
Anonymous
#62. Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer.
Arnold Aronson
#63. While the goal of all movies is to entertain, the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimulates thought and sets the mental juices flowing.
Sidney Lumet
#64. 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
#65. Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.
Walter Benjamin
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Art is a celebration of life, intended by the artist to put the spectator in touch with the divine.
Joseph Plaskett
#69. Editing is not merely a method of the junction of separate scenes or pieces, but is a method that controls the 'psychological guidance' of the spectator.
Vsevolod Pudovkin
#70. In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.
Bridget Riley
#71. The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.
Lawren Harris
#72. In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
#73. 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
#74. The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas ... Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture.
Mark Rothko
#75. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde
#76. Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
Wendell Phillips
#77. The dictatorship is embodied in the formal structure of the film (Days of 36). Imposed silence was one of the conditions under which we worked. The film is... made in such a way that the spectator realizes that censorship is involved.
Theodoros Angelopoulos
#78. Honesty in art inspires and moves me. I am passionate about creating truthful experiences as much as I love being the spectator to a brilliant body of work.
Crystal Reed
#79. The spectator, the contemplator, the opposer of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed combatants
Richard Eberhart
#80. The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.
Adam Smith
#81. The illusion of magic is an idealistic fantasy; it exists only in the imagination of the spectator.
Paul LePaul
#82. Why did God make tigers so good at catching prey, and at the same time make prey so good at getting away from tigers? You'd think that if God wanted one thing or the other to happen he'd have engineered it rather better. Maybe he enjoyed the spectator sport?
Richard Dawkins
#83. We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.
Martha Graham
#84. A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.
Marcel Proust
#85. I think words come between the spectator and the picture.
Howard Hodgkin
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
Bernard Berenson
#89. There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator.
Alain Resnais
#90. 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
#91. A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.
Henri Matisse
#93. One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator's sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
Edgar Allan Poe
#94. Love, reverence, and adoration, are multifaceted emotions. Similar to a painting by an artist, how we respond to a beautiful woman, nature, and the world that we encounter reveals the spectator and not life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.
Max Ernst
#98. 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
#100. 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
