Piet Mondrian Quotes

This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.

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

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

In almost every task involving form, there are dozens, often hundreds of contradictory elements, which need to be forced to work in harmony by man's will. This harmony can be acheived only through art.

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Music is the perfect type of art.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

Most great art is created when the artist feels they are channeling something rather than trying to communicate something.

You can't make something beautiful by trying to make something beautiful. Something becomes beautiful in the process of trying to be something else.

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

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Art employs method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth; but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct, while in the first it escapes from sight amid the shows of color and the curves of grace.

Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.

True works of art are a manifestation of the higher laws of nature.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

I love art. It is uplifting.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.