The mother art is architecture. Without
an architecture of our own, we have
no soul of our own civilization.
Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect
Architecture is the learned game, correct and
magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
Le Corbusier, French architect
Architecture starts when you carefully put
two bricks together. There it begins.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, German-American architect
Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
Louis Kahn, American architect
Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror.
Louis Sullivan, American architect
A modern, harmonic, and lively architecture
is the visible sign of an authentic democracy.
Walter Gropius, German architect
A great architect is not made by way of
a brain nearly so much as he is made by
way of a cultivated, enriched heart.
Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect
Architecture is the work of nations.
John Ruskin, English art critic
Christopher Wren, English architect
Architecture has recorded the great
ideas of the human race. Not only every
religious symbol, but every human
thought has its page in that vast book.
Victor Hugo, French writer
The job of buildings is to improve
human relations.
Ralph Erskine, Swedish architect
The principle of Gothic architecture
is infinity made imaginable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English writer
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Constantin Brancusi, Romanian sculptor
Ah, to build, to build! That is the
noblest of all the arts.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet
Architecture begins where engineering ends.
Walter Gropius, German architect
Architecture is not all about the design
of the building and nothing else; it is
also about the cultural setting and
the ambience, the whole affair.
Michael Graves, American architect
Form ever follows function.
Louis Sullivan, American architect
To create architecture is to put in order. Put
what in order? Function and objects.
Le Corbusier, French architect
I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.
Roy Lichtenstein, American artist
Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don’t want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
Maya Lin, American architect and artist
If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.
Arne Jacobsen, Danish architect
A structure becomes architectural, and
not sculptural, when its elements no longer
have their justification in nature.
Guillaume Apollinaire, French writer
I strive for an architecture from which
nothing can be taken away.
Helmut Jahn, German-American architect
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
John Ruskin, English art critic
If I had to say which was telling the truth
about society, a speech by a Minister of
Housing or the actual buildings put up in
his time, I should believe the buildings.
Kenneth Clark, English art critic
All architects want to live beyond their deaths.
Philip Johnson, American architect
Architecture, of all the arts, is the one that acts
most slowly but the most surely on the soul.
Ernest Dimnet, French writer
Architecture should speak of its time and
place, but yearn for timelessness.
Frank Gehry, Canadian-American architect
Rembrandt van Rijn, Dutch painter
Painting is silent poetry,
and poetry is painting that speaks.
Simonides, ancient Greek poet
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist
Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from
the weather and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce, American writer
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
John Singer Sargent, American painter
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous
opinions than anything else in the world.
Edmond de Goncourt, French writer
I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
Vincent van Gogh, Dutch painter
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist
A good painter is to paint two main things,
men and the working of man’s mind.
Leonardo da Vinci, Italian artist
There are many things one thinks about
in a painting. Often, it’s how to handle
your chosen medium and how to best
reveal the light in a three-dimensional
form on a two-dimensional surface.
Janice Tanton, Canadian artist
Painting is the nail to which I fasten my ideas.
Georges Braque, French painter and sculptor
I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting
lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no
paint, no canvas, I just think about it.
Steven Wright, American actor
Every good painter paints what he is.
Jackson Pollock, American painter
Good painting is the kind that
looks like sculpture.
Michelangelo, Italian artist
William Cullen Bryant, American poet
Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature,
That fashions all her works in high relief,
And that is Sculpture.
This vast ball, the Earth,
Was molded out of clay, and baked in fire;
Men, women, and all animals that breathe
Are statues, and not paintings.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet
Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist
I say that the art of sculpture is eight
times as great as any other art based on
drawing, because a statue has eight views
and they must all be equally good.
Benvenuto Cellini, Italian artist
A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.
Samuel Johnson, English writer
As paradoxical as it may seem, a great sculptor is as much a colorist as the best painter, or rather the best engraver. He plays so skillfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one as much as the most charming etchings.
Auguste Rodin, French sculptor
Sculpture, a very noble art, is one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade … the painter has to invent a process, [whereas] sculpture is helped by nature.
Leonardo da Vinci, Italian artist
I did my sculpture as a painter. I did not work as a sculptor.
Henri Matisse, French artist
A piece of sculpture can have a hole through
it and not be weakened if the hole is of a
studied size, shape, and direction.
Henry Moore, English artist
There is no substitute for feeling the stone, the metal, the plaster, or the wood in the hand; to feel its weight; to feel its texture; to struggle with it in the world rather than in the mind alone.
William M. Dupree, American sculptor
Bronze is the mirror of the
form; wine, of the heart.
Aeschylus, ancient Greek playwright
A hole in the block of a piece of sculpture
is in most cases nothing but the expression
of impotence and weakness.
Fritz Wotruba, Austrian sculptor
Anish Kapoor, Indian-English sculptor
The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-
toe, as light as animal footprints on snow.
Jean Arp, German-French (Alsatian) artist
As picture teaches the coloring, so
sculpture the anatomy of form.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American writer
A great sculpture can roll down
a hill without breaking.
Michelangelo, Italian artist
Sculpture is the art of the
hole and the lump.
Auguste Rodin, French sculptor
Within every block of wood and stone,
there dwells a spirit, waiting to be released.
Direct carving is a way of freeing the spirit—
my own and that of the stone or wood.
Hap Hagood, American sculptor
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mold.
The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.
Michelangelo, Italian artist
There are two devices which can help the sculptor to judge his work: one is not to see it for a while. The other … is to look at his work through spectacles which will change its color and magnify or diminish it, so as to disguise it somehow to his eye, and make it look as though it were the work of another.
Gianlorenzo Bernini, Italian artist
Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools.
Auguste Rodin, French sculptor
Maya Angelou, American writer
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one.
Isaac Asimov, American writer
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
W. H. Auden, Anglo-American poet
Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.
Robert Benchley, American writer and humorist
No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly
as a period put just at the right place.
Isaac Babel, Russian writer
Writing about art is only useful when
it leads to the experience of art.
Darby Bannard, American painter
A novel is balanced between a few true
impressions and the multitude of false ones
that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow, Canadian-born American writer
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire, French poet
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer
A small drop of ink makes thousands,
perhaps millions … think.
Lord Byron, English poet
Every great and original writer, in proportion
as he is great and original, must himself create
the taste by which he is to be relished.
William Wordsworth, English poet
Photography can never grow up if it
imitates some other medium. It has
to walk alone; it has to be itself.
Berenice Abbott, American photographer
Virginia Woolf, English writer
There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written—it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself.
Mark Twain, American writer
A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer
Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel.
Sam Abell, American photographer
A photograph is a secret about a secret.
The more it tells you, the less you know.
Diane Arbus, American photographer
Photograph: A picture painted by the
sun without instruction in art.
Ambrose Bierce, American writer
To me, photography is the simultaneous
recognition, in a fraction of a second,
of the significance of an event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer
The good photograph is not the object; the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.
Dorothea Lange, American photographer
A photo must make the viewer feel all the senses with one.
Todd Plough, American artist
A photograph is not only an image as a painting is an image, an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
Susan Sontag, American writer
For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Ernst Haas, Austrian artist
In the same way the karate practitioner must aim through the block to break it, the artist must aim through the photo to the subject to find the elements that can barely be felt.
Kitty Wallis, American artist