Quotes from book

Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 174
Context: If there are some who talk the same language as myself, then why should I neglect their interests for the sake of some other group of people who are alien and remote? They have their own 'gods and idols' and we have nothing in common.... If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 192
Context: Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition — otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 241
Context: Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 234
Context: Freedom is inseparable from conscience. And even if it is true that all the ideas developed by the social conciousness are the product of evolution, conscience at least has nothing to do with the historic process. Conscience, both as a sense and as a concept, is a priori immanent in man, and shakes the very foundations of the society that has emerged from our ill-conceived civilisation.

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 192
Context: Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition — otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 38
Context: Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken the wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalised action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself it serves another, higher and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling.

And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially or the sake of theoretical discussion.
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 114