Top 585 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sculptors

I'm looking forward to influencing others in a positive way. My message is you can do anything if you just put your mind to it.

Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

I think all great innovations are built on rejections.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

A piece of sculpture has to be more than a block of wood.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

The idea of flux, kind of constant change, whether it be our sense of time or geological time or cosmic time. It's always there, and I think that maybe it's a way of dealing with the idea of mortality, trying to acknowledge the fact that all things change, and whereas, maybe death is the end of one state of being it's the beginning of something else. I'm not talking about going to heaven or being reincarnated as a toad, I'm talking about the idea that the molecules in our bodies, or at least the atoms, were here at the beginning of the universe, and the sense that we are basically matter.

I think different people have different problems and different relations to the exhibition of their work.

If you really want to do it, you do it. There are no excuses.

While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.

I am in no mood to be deceived any longer by the crafty devil and false character whose greatest pleasure is to take advantage of everyone.

I heard someone say that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. I decided to sculpt camels in a needle.

I laugh with the sun, and mist that tries so hard to seduce the mountains.

Maybe if I really believe in me, trust me without any calculated plan, who knows what will happen?

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.

Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.

Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt

You have to make thousands and thousands of drawings before an illustration is perfected.

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.

Boundaries are actually the main factor in space, just as the present, another boundary, is the main factor in time.

I realized it wasn't necessary to work in the traditional methods of carving and casting.

The image my work invokes is the image of good - not evil; the image of order - not chaos; the image of life - not death. And that is all the content of my constructions amounts to.

Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul.

I thought I knew everything when I came to Rome, but I soon found I had everything to learn.

Let everyone witness how many different cards fortune has up her sleeve when she wants to ruin a man.

I was a gay man living in the epicenter of 20th-century America's worst health epidemic.

Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.

I want people to be overwhelmed with light and color in a way they have never experienced.

Deception is everywhere.

But I don't think that sculpture belongs in everyday life like a table does, or like a chair.

When one makes sculptures of horses, one remembers all of that great relationship that humans had with them.....Even today one raises horses only for dressage, the races, for the pleasure of horseback riding. It has become an animal of romance, an animal of pleasure which has lost its utility in the West.

It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered.

I honor every woman who has strength enough to step out of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another.

I realized... that the artist is always alone. Early in life I had thought I needed other people to confirm or approve what I was doing.

One has complexes. One has the art complex. One goes to the School of Fine Arts and catches the complexes.

Being an artist is not just about what happens when you are in the studio. The way you live, the people you choose to love and the way you love them, the way you vote, the words that come out of your mouth... will also become the raw material for the art you make.

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

Some people swear there's no beauty left in the world, no magic. Then how do you explain the entire world coming together on one night to celebrate the hope of a new year?

Life ... is never the way one imagines it. It surprises you, it amazes you, and it makes you laugh or cry when you don't expect it.

Restaurants, shows, night life, art exhibits, readings - New York is such a cultural epicenter, and while Jersey makes so much sense right now, I really am hoping to have my own future New York City some day.

Art must touch our lives, our fears and cares – evoke our dreams and give hope to the darkness.

Art is a reflection on life. Life isn’t something we can cut and fix. It’s always in a state of flux.

When a person disappears, everything becomes impregnated with that person's presence. Every single object as well as every space becomes a reminder of absence, as if absence were more important than presence.

My work is not so overtly about movement. My horses' gestures are really quite quiet, because real horses move so much better than I could pretend to make things move. For the pieces I make, the gesture is really more within the body, it's like an internalized gesture, which is more about the content, the state of mind or of being at a given instant. And so it's more like a painting...the gesture and the movement is all pretty much contained within the body.

I actually started to think a lot about the difference between a creative gesture and a noncreative gesture. I decided that all gestures were creative. Because you always have to make a decision at some point.

I have both exploited and been exploited in the print field.

My aim is to show the visible as possibility in a state of perpetual becoming.

I'm convinced that, in the end, art is not for the artist but for their fellow man.

For me the grotesque is necessary to understand beauty.

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

At first when I realized I was a romantic, I was sort of shocked and shamed. But it is true... that the material I work most with is emotion.

Quetzalcoatl is a primal idea of the duality of human nature. The serpent is the embodiment of Heaven and Earth. It scares people in many ways.

We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind. In the faith that looks through death, in years that bring the philosophic mind.

Well, it was one of my most gratifying experiences because I could devote my knowledge and my talent for the good for the City of Washington, and all the Federal projects where the Fine Arts Commission had jurisdiction, and it was a tremendous experience.

I had a tremendous horror of going into the Army. That is probably why I went to college for so long.

A piece of art is never a finished work. It answers a question which has been asked, and asks a new question.

I have always wanted my art to service my people - to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life.

But I have an African or Indian approach to what I find. I like to make use of everything. I can't bear to throw things away - a nice wine bottle, a nice box. Sometimes I feel like a wizard in Toytown, transforming a bunch of carrots into pomegranates.