5 Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Communication

Leo Tolstoy quotes on communication

14. Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

56. In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of affective communication between people.

57. By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.

59. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them.

62. Some teachers of mankind - as Plato... the first Christians, the orthodox Muslims, and the Buddhists - have gone so far as to repudiate art. ...[They consider it] so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills, that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art. ...such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. ...Now there is only fear, lest we should be deprived of any pleasures art can afford, so any type of art is patronized. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.