Josef Albers Quotes

The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.

Approach nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone ...

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

Where there is matter, there is geometry.

As a child it was clear to me that in some sense math was in the world around us. I became fascinated by what this means. When you look at the shape of the sun and the moon, they're circles, so every time you see a circular thing, there's pi embedded in it.

It turns out that hyperbolic structures are very common in nature, and the place where lots of people encounter them is coral reefs. Sea slugs, and a lot of other organisms with frilly forms, are biological manifestations of hyperbolic geometry, which is also found in the structure of lettuce leaves and kales, and some species of cactus.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

There is no end to the beauty for the person who is aware. Even the cracks between the sidewalk contain geometric patterns of amazing beauty.

How do we know for sure that no two snowflakes are the same - we haven't got anybody watching.

It's very important to get out, to do reporting. It's also really interesting. I come at it as a journalist, and I think that's helped me, and I come at it as someone who sees nature wherever he looks, and that helps.

For mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature is echoed in us and originates in the soul whose being is eternity and is hidden from us but none the less gives itself to us for the most part in the power of love and creation.

How insidious Nature is when one is trying to get at it experimentally.

Hard to find anything lovelier than a tree. They grow at right angles to a tangent of the nominal sphere of the Earth.

Intellect begins with the observation of nature, proceeds to memorize and classify the facts thus observed, and by logical deduction builds up that edifice of knowledge properly called science… But admittedly we also know by feeling, and we can combine the two faculties, and present knowledge in the guise of art.

I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden... name things as I find them.

The biologist passes. The frog stays the same.

To achieve progress nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric by looking and working.

The book of Nature is that which the physician must read; and to do so he must walk over the leaves.

When she sees the leaves fall, they raise no other idea in her mind than that winter is approaching.

How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.