Sean Scully Quotes

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The initial motivation of the experiment which led to this discovery was a subconscious feeling for the inexhaustible wealth of nature, a wealth that goes far beyond the imagination of man.

When I was a senior in high school, I went to Ireland to study Irish Gaelic. And after one semester at Trinity College, I went way out to the west coast of Ireland and rented a little house by myself.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

The world is much more mysterious than we ever thought.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.

I absolutely love Ireland. It's one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and I have strong ties here. Both my grandmothers are from Ireland, and I have spent every summer in Bantry since my father, who is an artist, had the romantic idea 20 years ago to buy an old farmhouse on the west coast and renovate it.

A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.

Sometimes Hollywood is a small town on the West Coast of America at the furthest point from everywhere else, and that can make it a little provincial and insular.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.

All that we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite.

The very great poverty of the Fishermen arises from the want of markets or other demand for fish. The Fishermen often see the creeks along the West Coast crammed with fine fish, when they could take tons of them at a haul, or shot, with a deep seine or drift net, but when caught they would be useless to them, as they could not either salt or sell them …. From the loss of the potatoes as a certain means of subsistence, the fishermen would give their undivided time to the Fisheries, instead of losing the best seasons by wasting their labor on a high-rented potato garden. They would thus throw an immense quantity of cured food such as Hake, Cod

For the European who came from a community of congestion and confinement, the West was beyond dreaming; it must have inspired him to formulate an idea of the infinite. There he could walk through geologic time; he could see into eternity.

There are two things that are infinite: The universe and human folly. And sometimes I am not sure about the universe.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.