Famous Quotes & Sayings

Josef Albers

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

Josef Albers

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

Josef Albers

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

Josef Albers

Therefore art means: you have to believe, to have faith, that is, cultivate vision.

Josef Albers

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

Josef Albers

The aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth.

Josef Albers

The role of art for me is the visualization of attitude, of the human attitude towards life, towards the world.

Josef Albers

The purpose of art is to re-present nature, not represent it.

Josef Albers

Art problems are problems of human relationship.

Josef Albers

There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and to formulations.

Josef Albers

I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others.

Josef Albers

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

Jose Marti

I come from all places and to all places I go: I am art among the arts and mountain among mountains. I know the strange names of flowers and herbs and of fatal deceptions and magnificent griefs. In night's darkness I've seen raining down on my head pure flames, flashing rays of beauty divine.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world .

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence..

Jose Bergamin

Art is good but it isn't the best.

Jose Bergamin

Effort and result are never simultaneous. In art, only the result counts.

Jose Bergamin

True art tries not to attract attention in order to be noticed.

Jorja Fox

I think I'm very easily inspired. People, wildlife, nature, music, art. I think that I'm lucky that I have this great sense of wonderment about life in general.

Jorge Luis Borges

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

Jorge Luis Borges

Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining...

Jorge Luis Borges

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral....

Jorge Luis Borges

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

Jorge Luis Borges

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.

Jorge Luis Borges

Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.

Jorge Luis Borges

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

Jorge Luis Borges

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

Jorge Luis Borges

Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.

Jorge Luis Borges

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

Jorge Luis Borges

The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.

Jorge Luis Borges

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

Jorge Luis Borges

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

Jorge Luis Borges

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.