QuoteProject
Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.
David Mamet
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Art serves as a genuine expression of joy and wonder, rather than a means to showcase personal achievements.

David Mamet emphasizes that true art arises from a place of pure emotion and a selfless intention, motivating artists to create not for recognition or to flaunt their own virtues, but to convey deep feelings of joy and awe. This perspective suggests that the most authentic artistic expressions connect more profoundly with others when they stem from a genuine spirit rather than a desire for validation.

Themes

ArtExpressionJoySelflessnessCreativity

In practice

Example use cases

Utilizing this quote in an art exhibition to emphasize the emotional core of the artwork.

More from David Mamet

They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
David MametRead
My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.
David MametRead
You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'
David MametRead
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
David MametRead
You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.
David MametRead
Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
David MametRead

Similar quotes

For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.
Marc ChagallRead
But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.
Claude DebussyRead
That's the magic of art and the magic of theatre: it has the power to transform an audience, an individual, or en masse, to transform them and give them an epiphanal experience that changes their life, opens their hearts and their minds and the way they think.
Brian Stokes MitchellRead
The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
Thorstein VeblenRead
Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
We do not evaluate the result but the starting point of the creative process. Precisely, this shows whether the form was discovered by starting from life, or for its own sake. That is why I consider the creative process so essential. Life for us is the decisive factor.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.