Sculpture Quotes

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.”
― Henri Matisse

“The greatest artist does not have any concept
Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain
Within its excess, though only
A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti, I Sonetti Di Michelangelo: The 78 Sonnets of Michelangelo with Verse Translation

“Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“Stars are always dancing. Sometimes they dance twinkling away with the rhythm of your joyful heart and sometimes they dance without movement to embrace your heartache as if frozen sculptures of open-armed sadness.”
― Munia Khan

“The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man

“Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt”
― Christian Boltanski

“Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and that it was the devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words ‘straight’, ‘square’, and ‘flat’ the words of noblemen, but the apple was an orb, and the sin of our first parents, the attempt at getting around God. I myself much prefer the art of painting to sculpture”
― Isak Dinesen

“As Henry Moore carved
or modelled his sculpture every day,
he strove to surpass Donatello

4. and failed, but woke the next morning
elated for another try.”
― Donald Hall

“Nobody admires the sculpture of dance, and my moves are as fluid as a statue, which few people are willing to pay to watch. That's why I'm now selling duck eggs at food shortage prices.”
― Jarod Kintz, BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm presents: Two Ducks Brawling Is A Pre-Pillow Fight

“If water could be shaped like clay, then swimming ducks would be master sculptors. If I were to commission a statue of myself, I'd hire splashing ducks at play.”
― Jarod Kintz, Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world

“Stones dream of shapes they might become. The sculptor has but to listen.”
― Thurin-Jon (as quoted)

“Fear always accompanies the making of art, generated by the shock of seeing an idea taking its form. A sculpture in the mind is safe and secure--the actual work rarely behaves as intended.”
― Andy Goldsworthy, Passage

“All good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—they are always modern, always of our time.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lecture to Art Students

“I dance like both my shoes are nailed to the wall. It goes way beyond mere performance and into the realm of art. I am the Rodin of the music world.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.”
― Richard Serra

“We don't catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“My art helps make sense of things.”
― Andy Goldsworthy, Passage

“And while I was going to meet
the flowers and sculptures of Montreux,
I smelled Lord Byron’s ink
sweating an amazing darkness out
from the medieval body of Chillon Castle

From the poem - Along the Shore”
― Munia Khan, Fireclay

“So I came back to philosophy, but differently; feeling it in myself, and in those I met in talk, a fever of the blood. I had come to it as a boy from wonder at the visible world; to know the causes of things; and to feel the sinews of my mind, as one feels one’s muscles in the palaestra. But now we searched the nature of the universe, and our own souls, more like physicians in time of sickness.

It was not that we were in love with the past. We were of an age to feel the present our own, and to suppose it would never outstrip us. In painting and sculpture and verse, the names we grew passionate over looked to us as big as those of Perikles’ day, and it still half surprises me when I find them unknown to my sons. But we seldom stood to enjoy good work, as one stands before a fine view or a flower, in simple gladness that it is. As we hailed each new artist we grew angry with the former ones, as with false guides we had caught out; we hastened, though we knew not where. To freedom, we said; the sculptors no longer proportioned their forms by the Golden Number of Pythagoras, as Pheidias and Polykleitos did; and art would do great things, we said, now it had cast off its chains.”
― Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

“Artists are low key astronauts.
Instead of going to the moon, they sit back in their studio and make the moon.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“Fine arts are are considered as seven sisters named as, Music, Sculpture, Literature , Drama, Architecture & Cinema. However in this digital age , another fine art is to be considered.To-day all seven fine art forms depend on photography for promotion, communication, documentation and survival. Photography should be called the eighth Fine Art.”
― Biju Karakkonam, Nature and Wildlife Photographer

“Swimming ducks are water sculptors. Their artwork takes shape in the form of play.”
― Jarod Kintz, Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world

“All probabilities have
stacked up to this imminent form, and
all causes have aligned according to
this pathway and not another. I could
otherwise have been another complex
of particles, another material altogether,
and perhaps also another form, for how
much does the material influence the
fingers that shape it? Does the material
similarly shape the whims of its
sculptor?”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

“Replicas of Kamasutra sculptures from Khajuraho, an inside joke because Neel loved to tease Nisha about honeymooning at the erotically carved caves, much to her horror. Yash certainly did not want their parents to know.”
― Sonali Dev, Incense and Sensibility

“Sculpture isn't a thing you set out to do and succeed in. It's a thing that gets at you, that nags at you - and haunts you - so that you've got, sooner or later, to make terms with it. And then, for a bit, you get some peace - until the whole thing starts over again,”
― Agatha Christie, The Hollow

“Riveting discoveries unfurl when one thinks the unimaginable, instead of imagining the unthinkable…for thought precedes imagination and sculptures acceptance for new ideas.”
― Dr. Anhad Kaur Suri

“The truest evidence that any civilization ever leaves behind about itself is its art. Art never lies.”
― Waldemar Januszczak, Understanding Art

“Miriam admired the statue of a beautiful youth, a pearlfisher; who had got entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among the pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the seaweeds, all of like value to him now.

“The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,” remarked she. “But what a strange efficacy there is in death! If we cannot all win pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as well. I like this statue, though it is too cold and stern in its moral lesson; and, physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient repose.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun