Sergei Diaghilev

"The world needs more beauty, not less."

"Art is the evidence of our humanity."

"I serve beauty and nothing else."

"The greatest luxury is experiencing great art."

"Life is a performance, make it magnificent."

"Astonish me! That is all I ask of art."

"A man can live and believe well enough in solitude; but he cannot work well in solitude."

"The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead."

"I have made the public cry, now I want to make them think."

"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."

"The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe things because one wishes them to be so."

"To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind."

"One must above all things keep faith with the past and with the great masters."

"Art is not to be found by going after it, but by going after the methods of the masters."

"The only thing I regret is that I have not enough energy to do all the things I want to do."

"Culture is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned afresh by each generation anew."

"A curator must know how to look, and to see - the rest follows naturally."

"The theater is the only art form that is truly alive and democratic."

"To create, one must first destroy the old to make room for the new."

"Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed."

"Every artist should be stripped of all conventions before they can truly create."

"The secret of perfection is knowing when to stop."

"Dance is the hidden language of the soul."

"Tell me what you read, and I shall tell you what you are."

"One must always go forward, never backward; progress is the law of nature."

"Beauty lies in the extraordinary, not the ordinary."

"The role of the impresario is to unite the great talents of his time."

"An artist without patrons is like a ship without sails."

"To love art, one must first love life itself."

"In art, convention is the death of creation."