Quotes About Expression

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me.

Painting from nature is not copying the object it is realizing one's sensations.

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all.

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

I have nothing to hide in art. The initial force alone can bring anyone to the end he must attain.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art

I paint as I see, as I feel...They also feel and see like me, but they don't dare...I dare.

The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.

Wherever one went the world was blooming. And yet despair gave birth to poetry.

There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and enroute. — from "The Meridian

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.

I am not sure the language I write in is spoken here, or anywhere.

Art is a harmony parallel with nature

If you see a red tree, paint it bright red.

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.

At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered.

I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday. When I said that one may love and be loved at any age I ought to have added that sometimes this love comes too late. It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to the loved one how much she is loved, except by love's sacrifice.