Top 9 Escher Quotes & Sayings

When I was in Cambridge reading mathematics, I went to Amsterdam for the International Mathematics Congress. There I saw M.C. Escher's fascinating work. That inspired me to try my hand at drawing such impossibilities.

If I had to pick one artist to tile my bathroom I would go with MC Escher.

What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body?

The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.

I look at people like Picasso and Da Vinci and Escher and Miles Davis, and they'll write or paint that one definitive masterpiece of maybe 50 that they have that's really trying to go outside the box, trying to do something that's tough. And then when you accomplish it, you look back and go, 'Yeeaaaah - masterpiece.'

A woman once rang me up and said, 'Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print -Reptiles- you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.' I replied, 'Madam, if that's the way you see it, so be it.'

Storytelling isn't an Escher staircase.

I became interested in AI in high school because I read 'Goedel, Escher, Bach,' a book by Douglas Hofstader. He showed how all their work in some ways fit together, and he talked about artificial intelligence. I thought 'Wow, this is what I want to be doing.'