Natural Forms Quotes

Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.

No form of nature is inferior to art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms.

What's interesting about architects is, we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature, and arguably, beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature.

Nothing is art if it does not come from nature.

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.

Nature in no case cometh short of art, for the arts are copiers of natural forms.

There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners.

For mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature is echoed in us and originates in the soul whose being is eternity and is hidden from us but none the less gives itself to us for the most part in the power of love and creation.

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

Change is a natural form of progression.

The whole of nature is an endless demonstration of shape and form. It always surprises me when artists try to escape from this.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit ~ not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.

Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature, That fashions all her works in high relief, And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth, Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women, and all animals that breathe Are statues, and not paintings.

As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools.

Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.

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.

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.

What attracts me are free and sensual curves. The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love.

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.