Ben Shahn Quotes

I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.

Form follows beauty.

I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

Art is when things appear rounded.

one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.

I knew style and content went hand in hand.

For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

I call architecture frozen music.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

A rhyme doesn't make a song.

I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones.

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

Form and function are a unity, two sides of one coin. In order to enhance function, appropriate form must exist or be created.

It's all in how you arrange the thing... the careful balance of the design is the motion.

After I finish writing a chapter, I'll print it out, cut it up into paragraphs, and cut away any transition sentences. Then I shuffle all the paragraphs and lay them out as they come. As I arrange and hold them next to each other, very quickly a natural structure for the chapter presents itself.