Josef Albers Quotes

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

Science is not addressed to poets.

The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.

Art is science in the flesh.

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.

I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.

Science has changed the face of this earth: it has harnessed the forces of Nature -- forces whose secret laws it had first to discover -- it has created practically a new world within the memory of men living….Science -- the scientists -- doesn't pretend to have grasped in its fingers the Eternal Truth …Science doesn't demand that one believe or be damned. Science reasons. Science investigates. Science tests itself….Science works -- builds -- quietly prevails -- promises little and performs much.

Millions are spend annually on the cultivation and dissemination of science by the public authorities who will not give a penny for the advancement of astrology or sorcery. In other words, our society is deeply committed to beliefs about the nature of things, beliefs which are different from those to which the early Egyptian or Aztec civilizations were committed.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty.

I've been thinking a lot about the speed and spectacle in today's fashion industry, because they seem to mirror stresses in other creative fields.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

I think it is important to have a balance of science and arts to be able to be accessible in either fields.

I find it fascinating the things that capture people's imagination.

I love to look at beauty.

In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.

We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.

Joe Wright is incredible and I'm a huge admirer of his work in general, but specifically his aesthetics and poeticism.

Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.

I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind.

An Englishman will take you into a large room, beautifully proportioned, and will point out to you that it is white- all over white- and somebody will say what exquisite taste. You know in your own mind, in your own soul, that it is not taste at all˘that is the want of taste˘that is mere evasion. English music is white and evades everything.