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Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

Doctor Zhivago
The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
Making music, dancing, the theater, conversation, proper and urbane deportment, these were cultivated here as particular arts. It was not the military, nor the political, nor the commercial, that was predominant in the life of the individual and of the masses.

The World of Yesterday
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

Ulysses
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

A Room of One's Own
Art teaches nothing except the significance of life.
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

Status Anxiety
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
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