Joyce Cary (Art and Reality)

 1998

'Art has its immense power for good and evil because it deals always with fundamental passions and reactions common to all humanity. Even its simplest forms, a single phrase of music, a color pattern, it can give a shock of pleasure which makes life valuable. For that enjoyment has no relation with appetite or self-satisfaction. It is something freely given, a good, a grace, belonging simply to existence, to reality itself. For that minute, the meaning of existence is this special pleasure, the emotion of beauty.'

Chapter XXXI Good and Evil