Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile.
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.
When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.
Sculptured figures which appear in motion, will, in their standing position, actually look as if they were falling forward.
Happy will be those who give ear to the words of the dead: - The reading of good works and the observing of their precepts.
All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.
I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.
Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.
Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.
My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.
Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been a cruel jilt to me; I did not abandon her, she abandoned me.
We have very beautiful bad weather here at present - rain, wind, thunder - but with splendid effects; that's why I like it.
I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.
In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of 'freedom', like a bastard brother of reform.
At times I come across works of mine which are soundly done and really in my style, and at such moments I find great solace.
I'm aware that success can overwhelm you. The perception of you can be elevated to such a status that it's not you any more.
No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.
The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.
No one is famous when they wake up in the morning, so it's nice seeing people in moments when they're just being themselves.
I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.
It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws
Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.
The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.
[My parents] met in university back in the '70s. And I didn't grow up with my father. He - they separated before I was born.
Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us.
There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.
What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.
The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.
The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.
The essence of painting has actually always been to make it [the universal] plastically perceptible through colour and line.
The ultimate essence of yoga is the contact and the union between the individual consciousness and the divine consciousness.
Children don't play outside enough. For hundreds of thousands of years young people spent time outside - until 15 years ago.
Everyone can identify with a fragrant garden, with beauty of sunset, with the quiet of nature, with a warm and cozy cottage.
Someday, when I'm awfully low, and the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight.
I respected Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Those were my heroes, and they were 10 years older than I was.
I believe it is one's duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We need gaiety and happiness, hope and love.
Our real nature is not our imaginary, limited ego. Our true nature is vast, all-comprehensive, and intangible as empty space.
It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.
You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.
The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.
The sound of water escaping from mill dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things.
I make a composition with a white and a black, and make adjustments when the white has become a paper and the black a shadow.
Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.
If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.
At a time when experimentation expresses itself in all forms of life, search becomes the only valid expression of the spirit.
I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.
When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.