picture quotes

Omnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est, et speculum. Each creature of the world Is as a book, a picture, And a mirror to us.

-Alan of Lille also known as  'Alanus de Insulis'
c.1170  De Incarnatione Christi (Rhythmus  Alter), l.1^3.

Perhaps the artist who seeks dignity above all in his 'historia', ought to represent very few figures; for as paucity of words imparts majesty to a prince, provided histhoughts and orders are understood, so the presence of only the strictly necessary numbers of bodies confers dignity on a picture.

- Leon Battista Alberti
  On Painting (translated by Cecil Grayson).

That is the best part of beauty, which a picture cannot express.

- Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
  Essays, no.43,'Of Beauty'.

The crucified Jesus is the only accurate picture of God the world has ever seen.

-John Austin Baker
  The Foolishness of God.

One picture is worth ten thousand words.

- Frederick R Barnard
  In Printer's Ink,10 Mar.

The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe.

-John Coltrane
  Quoted in sleeve-note to the re-issue of Coltrane's Sound (originally published1961).

When I set down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing Itry to do istoforgetthat Ihave ever seena picture.

-John Constable
Quoted in C R Leslie Memoirs of theLife of John Constable (1843).

Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never paya farthing for it.

- Oliver Cromwell
  Remark to Sir Peter Lely, who was about to paint his portrait. Quoted in H  Walpole Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol.3 (1763).

Each individual work serves as an expression of our most personal state of mind at that particular moment and of the inescapable, imperative need for release by means of an appropriate act of creation: in the rhythm, form, colour and mood of a picture.

- Lyonel Feininger
  Letter to Paul Westheim, quoted in Wolf-Dieter Dube The Expressionists (1972).

   A picture that is beautiful, or that comes off, or that works, looks as if it was all made at one stroke.

- Helen Frankenthaler
  Quoted in Ian Crofton (ed)  A Dictionary of  Art Quotations (1988).

The movie-makers are able to put more reality into a picture about theterrors of life at the ocean bottom than into a tale of two Milwaukeeans in love.

- Ben Hecht
  In news reports,13  Jun.

I always try to write as good as the best picture that was ever painted.

- Ernest Millar Hemingway
Quoted in the Saturday Review, 9 May1964.

The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.

- SirAlfred Joseph Hitchcock
Quoted in Fran c° ois Truffaut Hitchcock (1968).

I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description.

-Winslow Homer
On being asked about the meaning of a painting by a dealer. Quoted by Andrea Bennett in the NewYork Times Book Review, 15 Sep1991.

I want every family in America to have a carpet on the floor and a picture on the wall. After bread, you've got to have a picture on the wall.

- Lyndon B(aines) also called LBJ Johnson
On visiting Pittsburgh's Polish^Czech area. Quoted in  Alistair Cooke The Americans (1980).

The identifying ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct; the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen, is me.

- D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
  'Art and Morality'.

The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

-Walter Lippmann
  Public Opinion, ch.23.

His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture.

-1st Baron
  'Robert Montgomery', in the Edinburgh Review,  Apr.

The Last Picture Show.

- LarryJeff McMurtry
   Title of novel, subsequently filmed.

Dass nicht alles auf einmal da ist, bleibt als Bedingung des Lebens und der Erz a« hlung zu achten, und man wird sich doch wohl gegen die gottgegebenen Formen menschlicher Erkenntnis nich auflehnen wollen. Let usnot forgetthe conditionof lifeasnarration: that we can never see the whole picture at onceunless we propose to throw overboard all the God-conditioned forms of human knowledge.

-Thomas Mann
  Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), vol.2.

Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing ina humanface or manifested by violent movement.The entirearrangement of my picture isexpressive: theplace occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share.

- Henri EŁ  mile Beno|"  t Matisse
  'Notes d'un peintre', in La Grande Revue.

All my life I've beenworking on the workevery canvas a sentence or paragraph of it. Each picture is onlyan approximation of what I want.

- Robert Motherwell
Recalled on his death,16  Jul1991.

   If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human facefor ever.

- George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
  Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt.3, ch.3.

  Painting is nothing but a representation of surfaces and solidsforeshortenedorenlarged, and putontheplaneof the picture in accordance with the fashion in which the real objects seen by the eye appear on this plane.

-Piero della Francesca
c.1480^1490  De Prospectiva Pingendi.

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to actrather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or 'express'an object, actual or imagined.What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

- Harold Rosenberg
  'TheAmerican Action Painters', in Art News, no.51, Dec.

Poetry therefore, is an art of imitation† A speaking picture, with this end: to teach and delight.

- Sir Philip Sidney
  The Defence of Poetry.

If someone was stupid enough to offer me a million dollars to make a pictureI was certainly not dumb enough to turn it down.

- Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor
Quoted in David Niven The Moon's a Balloon (1975).

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting.

-John Hoyer Updike
  Self-Consciousness,VI.'On Being A Self Forever'.

It isno more easy to make a good picture than it isto find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

-Vincent van Gogh
  From a letter to his brotherTheo, early Oct.

A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

-James (Abbott) McNeill Whistler
  The GentleArt of Making Enemies.

Johnny, keep it out of focus. I want to win the foreign picture award.

- Billy (Samuel) Wilder
  Remark to cameramanJohn Seitz during the making of Sunset Boulevard.

Making a picture with Marilyn Monroe was like going to the dentist. It was hell at thetime, but after it was all over it was wonderful.

- Billy (Samuel) Wilder
Quoted in Doug McClelland Star Speak (1987).