Bernard Sumner Quotes

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

I'm affected by my environment. Los Angeles makes me defensive and wary.

I'm not going to argue with scientists how much human activity affects natural environment, including climate.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

Drawing is feeling. Color is an act of reason.

The scenery when it is truly seen reacts on the life of the seer.

What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.

Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer.

Now there are heavy houses everywhere and more of them are being built. In fact, it is only when more houses are being constructed that some countries consider their economics healthy. Yet each house is a heavy footprint on the Earth. Just as all our possessions represent-if we cannot learn ways of sharing them-a weight and clutter that often means the faces of future generations will look up into darkness and the pressure on the Earth of "things."

One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.

I find the surface of a photograph a thing of beauty in and of itself, and it is this surface that makes a photograph unique relative to other two-dimensional media.

But certain winds will make men's temper bad.

It is progress when a centuries-old oak is cut down to give space for a road sign.

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.

A man without scenery is completely disarmed.

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Color is a means to exert a direct influence on the soul.

Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.

History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct, is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use.