Portraits Quotes

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port

~ Anatole Broyard

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

~ Héloïse D'argenteuil

There are no bad pictures, that's just how your face looks sometimes.

~ Abraham Lincoln

All portraits reveal both the the painter and the person painted. In many ways all paintings are self-portraits. All part of why art informs.

~ Brent M. Jones

All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them.

~ Nuno Roque

There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits.The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you!You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes.The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out.

~ Jean Lorrain

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay