Jean Nouvel Quotes

Long live the sun which gives us such beautiful color.

As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

I see less and less... I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up... I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell?divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and eveningApollo and the sweet Muses of the Light? You enterprised a railroad?you blasted its rocks away? And, now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.

European standards of beauty are something that plague the entire world - the idea that darker skin is not beautiful, that light skin is the key to success and love. Africa is no exception.

Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of the (angel's) garments, the waving robes of those whose faces see God.

Also marvelous in a room is the light that comes through the windows of a room and that belongs to the room. The sun does not realize how beautiful it is until after a room is made. A man’s creation, the making of a room, is nothing short of a miracle. Just think, that a man can claim a slice of the sun.

I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen.

The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape.

Take your light and take your love into the world as the only weapons that we need to make this world truly glorious, truly beautiful, and astonish all of life.

Actually, if you look at the works of the great architects of our time, you can see that their most beautiful works are always their later works - Kahn, Corbusier, even Gehry.

No one should notice how your eyes are done or the color of your eyeshadow. They should just notice you and notice that you're beautiful, that you have beautiful eyes.

It is necessary to introduce light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, and a sufficient amount of blues, to obtain an airy feeling.

We think of color as a thing that we’re receiving. And if you go into one of the Skyspaces, you can see that it’s possible to change the color of the sky. Now, I obviously don’t change the color of the sky, but I changed the context of vision.

As any man, I, of course, have certain preferences. Being a Scot by birth, I'm inclined to favor those with a well-scrubbed look and a hint of color in their cheeks-put there by an early walk in the chill air rather than by rouge. The smell of soap on a woman's skin or the hint of shampoo in her hair is perfume enough for me . . . Humor is important. The most beautiful woman in the world is a bore without that.

Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

As I have said many times before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!

Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment and chaos. It is restful even to imagine expression without words.

You will have to scrutinize the model sharply to find the proportions - how the weight is supported, how each joint is functioning... Look for the color and tone and texture... how the light falls on the figure, especially the face.

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

We have to see today in light of the transition, say, from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry, and from industry to post-industry. We're in an epoch transition.

The whole switch from film to digital has changed some of the ways I use color and the juxtaposition of light and dark. It's getting better with digital, the separation's gotten better, but I still feel like it's really flatter than film, so I do a lot of screening and subtle textural printing and painting on clothes for film to get it not to look flat.

I also learned that you are affected by your environment, even if you try not to be. Color, light that is, matters because you want to do justice to it and also you get excited by it.