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Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

— Nadine Gordimer Writing and Being (1991)

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Art

More quotes by Nadine Gordimer

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nadine Gordimer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.