Albrecht Durer Quotes

Simplicity is natures first step, and the last of art.

I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)

If there is some art involved, I'd like it to be that it came through the cracks of daily work.

For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.

Nature is the most beautiful thing we have. It's better than art because it's from the creator.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don't try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary.

Land really is the best art.

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.

Reduction! One wants to say more than nature and one makes the impossible mistake of wanting to say it with more means than she, instead of fewer.

The art of art... is simplicity.

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

The highest condition of art is artlessness.

It fascinates me to create beautiful paintings with the simplest means.

Simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.

I believe it is no wrong Observation, that Persons of Genius, and those who are most capable of Art, are always fond of Nature, as such are chiefly sensible, that all Art consists in the Imitation and Study of Nature. On the contrary, People of the common Level of Understanding are principally delighted with the Little Niceties and Fantastical Operations of Art, and constantly think that finest which is least Natural.

I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.

Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.

Simplicity is the great friend to nature, and if I would be proud of anything in this silly world, it should be of this honest alliance.

When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.

A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is.

What attracted me about my mirrors was the idea of having nothing manipulated in them. A piece of bought mirror. Just hung there, without any addition, to operate immediately and directly. Even at the risk of being boring. Mere demonstration. The mirrors, and even more the Panes of Glass, were also certainly directed against Duchamp, against his Large Glass.

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more.

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.