Max Beckmann Quotes

There's design, and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature - if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty - but mostly suffering!

Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.

So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

Order and creativity are complementary.

White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge. Bring order to the whole Through design, composition, tension, balance, light, and harmony.

There is no better designer than nature

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

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

I get on my porch with my guitar, look at my trees, and write a song.

Music creates order out of chaos.

I’m interested in natural growth patterns, and the beautiful forms that only nature creates. How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I’m trying to understand.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

In her (nature's) inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

Proportion is the heart of beauty.

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.

Nature never writes a blind hand.

In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.

What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.

All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.

Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.

Fill a space in a beautiful way.