Top 585 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sculptors - Page 2

I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work.

Each work has its own space, which should neither be conceived as a sort of cage nor regarded as extending to infinity.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.

All art is a confession.

We see parts of each other, and we put them together. But if I want to see you in totality, you need to move away; we need space between us. Across the street, I can see all of you at once, but then I also see this huge vista of space surrounding you, coming in and compressing you.

In modern societies, some members of ethnic minority groups do not want to feel compelled to heed the voices of their communities when participating as citizens.

I believe that everything has a purpose and that everything a person does will come back to haunt or save him. Life is like a mirror in which everything we do is reflected back to us. We might not be able to recognize the reflection, and at times the image may be hidden. We may take years to see it or it may not even be visible during our lifetime. But it all comes around in the end. Space is as infinite as our actions are timeless. We are all part of the same invisible story, all travelling in a single continuum.

There are several really interesting clocks in Berlin.

In nakedness I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the trappings of pretension.

Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime.

That two bodies press convulsively together, man and woman, he fertilizing her, he giving her a budding life, or he planting a seed, a seed of life in her womb - Oh God. I think this God-given idea is so enormous, so eternal, so endlessly wise - that people should not be allowed to depict it in art!!

I don't believe in inspiration. I believe in work, because while one works one's creativity is opened.

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

The line is a whole, an identity, for a particular place and time.

I think if you have the compulsion to write, you're not going to feel whole until you start putting words on paper.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

I love the idea of engaging the object, whether it be architecture or a piece of good graphic design, or a good painting, or piece of sculpture, or even a piece of industrial manufactured object. A piece of engineering can be quite beautiful, too, or a photomicrograph, or a cosmic photograph. We're physical beings and why deny that. So in that sense, it's very sensual to have an object that has the power to communicate some emotion or a state or give you some sense.

To think of abstraction as an end in itself is undoubtedly letting oneself be led into a cul-de-sac and can only lead to exhaustion and impotence.

I'm crazy, I'm nuts. Just the way my brain works. I'm not normal. I think differently.

When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left.

I never met a color I didn't like.

In short, Beauty is everywhere. It is not that she is lacking to our eye, but our eyes which fail to perceive her. Beauty is character and expression. Well, there is nothing in nature which has more character than the human body. In its strength and its grace it evokes the most varied images. One moment it resembles a flower: the bending torso is the stalk; the breasts, the head, and the splendor of the hair answer to the blossoming of the corolla. The next moment it recalls the pliant creeper, or the proud and upright sapling.

When I first heard that Barack Obama was going to be the first black president, I wanted to do the smallest, biggest tribute in history.

They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is.

I think it is very important to know that we are going to die. Now we refuse the fact of dying. There was once serenity in dying where you had all your children around you in a ceremony and would utter your last words with something like, 'I love the sky'.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.

Photography is used to give evidence, and the evidence is always deceiving.

Yes, people do come across the street to say hi, but as they approach and get near, my perception of space begins to dissolve, and a new interest takes over that is primarily emotional, and with it comes a desire to touch, which may be a human interest, but not the interest of my work.

I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers.

The laws can't be enforced against the man who is the laws' master.

One day, I saw a statue of Benjamin Franklin, and I said to myself, 'I can do that kind of work, too.'

I can't do the movies like I do painting because I am really more of a sort of dilettante or something. I mean I know guys that make movies that I can see it is absolutely their medium and they can just go from one movie right into the next because it is just - they have got it so much on the tips of their fingers. But for me it is a special effort.

What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts.

I heard that Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Evolution must be a myth then.

DaDa is beautiful like the night, who cradles the young day in her arms.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

My reading and drawing drew me away from the ordinary interests, and I lived a great deal in the world of imagination, feeding upon any book that fell into my hands. When I had got hold of a really thick book like Hugo's 'Les Miserables,' I was happy and would go off into a corner to devour it.

The most precise work is generally done by hand, with hand tools. Some people rely on machines for their precision, and my way of working is backwards. I rely on the machines for doing the gross stock removal and then, when it comes to the final refinements and fitting of joints and things, making things work together, I rely more on sharp-edged tools that I push by hand.

Art is not concerned with the meditation about what is and how it came to be. That is a task for knowledge. Knowledge is born of the desire to know, Art derives from the necessity to communicate and to announce.

L.A. as a geographical entity is very much a mixture of surf, desert, and the mountains, earthquakes and urban sprawl. Within an hour of driving, you can be out into the desert. I like that very much about living on the edge of a continent, conceptually is an interesting place to be. You're at this kind of juncture of a tectonic plate. The idea that the Pacific Ocean is right behind us, on a macro scale, is an interesting place to be.

If I had to, I would ask first of all: why do things move in your work? It's the most simple, and also the most complicated, question. And I answer: things move because if they didn't move, they might move?.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

If I'm O.K., I will abandon restrictions and curbs imposed on myself. Not physical ones, but those restrictive tabs on my inner being, on solely myself. I will strip me of superficial dishonesties. I will paint against every rule I or others have invisibly placed.

Perhaps it's art; but if it isn't, at least it's something else equally interesting to me!

But if you can find that spot - I suppose it's like running - I used to be a swimmer and swim laps, and you just have to be there with what you're doing.

All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.

It was important that I learn that what I wanted was no different from what other artists wanted: confidence that I could be my own censor, audience, and competition.

When everything goes right a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise!

It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.

Most people don't see the edginess in my work. They think it's all fantasy and whimsy.

I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born. I have confidence in it. I do not think about it.

I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate.

Last night, two men tried to force my shutters. I recognized them: they are two of Rodin's Italian models. He told them to kill me. I am in his way; he wants to get rid of me.

Color is whatever comes out of the material and keeps it what it is.

One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.

You may go from the Battery to Harlem, and in our monuments and statues of public men you will see the slavish adherence to Greek and Roman ideals, from which our artists cannot get away.

Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.

Nothing grows well in the shade of a big tree.

Flying helicopters is what I do for fun.