Sam Francis Quotes

What is beauty, anyway? It's more than something pleasant looking. If it doesn't stop us in our tracks and make us unable to move for a moment, unable to put into words what's closing off the breath in our throats, then maybe it's pretty, but it probably isn't beauty.

Art is the ultimate luxury good, but one that can make you think, give a you a blast of beauty and enhance your life. Even if the work's made of plasticine.

I feel that the arts have an impact in a way that just makes the world more beautiful.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

I've come to believe in the primacy of form - the notion of art seducing you through your senses, through your eyeballs.

I don't think I'm an artist or that I'm doing anything superintellectual. What's important to me is to get a visceral reaction from people, for them to want that coat because they think it's beautiful.

When you see or hear something beautiful, it's like that thing is transmitting a kind of energy, and if that energy helped create the work, the only thing I can do is play it when I finally show the work.

The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

Some may think fashion is frivolous, but the way I see it, when you dress well, you add beauty to the world. And there's nothing wrong with that, right?

Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Do you know what a blessing it is to make movies that make people happy?

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic

My idea is to paint paintings so that when you walk into a room, I'm pulling you in, or that makes you suddenly stop and wonder: 'What is this? There is something groovy, something else going on here.' Also, I want to give you what is obvious and what is not obvious to the eye.

Beauty is like a soul that hovers over the surface of form. Its presence is unmistakable in art or in life.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.

I think the feeling of being kind of overwhelmed is almost part of the aesthetic of the work.

I'm hungry as an artist to find opportunities to contribute to the world in a more meaningful way than just numbing people through entertainment.

I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.