Dogen Zenji Quotes

What is art? Nature concentrated.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.

The art of art... is simplicity.

O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.

Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Land really is the best art.

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

I think everybody starts out by seeing a few works of art and wanting to do something like them. You want to understand what you see, what is there, and you try to make a picture out of it. Later you realize that you can't represent reality at all - that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.

Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.

A good poem is a contribution to reality.

Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.

What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

Art is love and it covers. It sheilds.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

If the real world is orange juice, then art is like orange-juice concentrate.