Sculpture Quotes

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

~ Karen Blixen

In poetry we pare down our thoughts into their most graceful shapes, like minimalist sculptures.

~ Patricia Robin Woodruff

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

~ Kamand Kojouri

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

As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day,he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.

~ Donald Hall

The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

~ Louis L'amour

... those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the pâtisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child.

~ Caryll Houselander

The greatest artist does not have any conceptWhich a single piece of marble does not itself containWithin its excess, though onlyA hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.

~ Michelangelo Buonarroti

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

I assert that the art of sculpture, among all the arts connected with design, is at least seven times greater than any other, for the following reason: why, sir, a statue of true sculpture ought to have seven points of view, which ought all to boast equal excellence.

~ Benvenuto Cellini

The greatest masters have only made single statues, groups are always inferior; that is why Carpeaux, big though he was, is less so than Rodin, for he never knew how to make single statues. He did not know how to find his rhythm in the arrangement of the shapes of one body, but obtained it by the disposition of several. The great sculptors are there to prove it. Think of the masterpieces which we like most, all standing or seated, and one at a time, and they are not in the least monotonous. The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure.

~ H.s. Ede

With Michelangelo anatomical science is transformed into music. With him the human body is architectonic matter for the construction of dreams.

~ Umberto Boccioni

Dance is moving sculpture.

~ Pablito Greco

In time, all great masterpieces turn into shameless creatures who laugh at their creators.

~ Erol Ozan

Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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

You are God's chisel, it is you He uses to create masterpieces.

~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Your life is a sculpture, every day chip away.

~ J.r. Rim

What a face this girl possessed!—Could I neither die then nor gaze at her face every day, I would need to recreate it through painting or sculpture, or through fatherhood, until a second such face could be born.

~ Roman Payne

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night! …Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.

~ Roman Payne

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

~ Roman Payne

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

~ Damien Hirst

Moonlight is sculpture, sunlight is painting.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins, it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

~ Anish Kapoor

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

~ Chuck Close

The skull is nature's sculpture.

~ David Bailey

Moonlight is sculpture.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

~ Frank Zappa

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

~ Pablo Picasso

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

~ Constantin Brancusi

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

~ Robert Smithson

From time to time, I've experimented with sculpture or metal design. It's a good break from just sitting behind the keyboard.

~ Chad Hurley

Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.

~ Thomas Hoving

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.

~ Joseph Addison

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

~ Ezra Pound