It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

— Jonathan Ive

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

— David Foster Wallace

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

— Robert Hayden

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; while working at Haus Esters, about 1927/28.

Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.

— Bill Bullard

The only routine with me is no routine at all.

— Jackie Onassis

Robert Barry | Closed Gallery | 1969

But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

— Kurt Vonnegut

Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.

— Carl Sagan

Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.

— Pablo Neruda

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

[...] und ich möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

— Paul Gauguin

Carl Andre | now now | 1967

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.

— Donald Judd

It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way — not his way.

— Mark Rothko

Istvan Kantor | Gift at MOMA New York | 1988

I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.

— Richard Serra

Ordinary life does not interest me.

— Anaïs Nin

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Simplicity of form is not necessarily simplicity of experience.

— Robert Morris

Andy, take my picture.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

— Jean-Michel Basquiat

Playing chess with Bobby ...

For my total life, I have been comfortable in black, not in white, not the lightness. I was born in Tokyo after the bombing, so I feel this is my roots; the ruined Tokyo. This dark side of life is attractive to me, from the beginning. Too much harmony is boring, maybe conflict is charming. Black is simple, yet it says so much.

— Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto for Pina Bausch, 25th anniversary
of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Foundation, 1998

We don't do art. We solve problems.

— Charles Eames

The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other; as has been said: Everything breathes together.

— Plotinus

Björk and Karlheinz Stockhausen

Everything passes. Everything changes. Just do what you think you should do.

— Bob Dylan

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.

— Jack Kerouac

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Bas Jan Ader | Primary Time | 1974

Don't ask what it means or what it refers to. Don't ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.

— Eva Hesse

Richard Long | A line in the Himalayas | 1975

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

— Anaïs Nin

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