Agnes Denes Quotes

Society likes to file you away, put you in this or that category. And I never fit any category. Maybe that's why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it.

If I like a person, I like them. I may like the art and not like the person.

People have too many problems during the day; they don't want to think.

Pattern-finding is the purpose of the mind and the construct of the universe. There are an infinite number of patterns, some of which are known; those still unknown hold the key to unresolved enigmas and paradoxes.

People always understand everything in retrospect.

I always was alone. And I'm alone today. It's fine. I have lots of friends, but not in terms of working together.

My work is about helping humanity.

I wish I didn't have daily problems to deal with, so that I could just concentrate on learning more, every single day.

I'm mostly self-taught. I didn't learn much in school.

The tree is made by nature, mathematics by people. And combining the two is creating this beautiful alliance between humanity and nature. That's why my forests are mathematical expansion systems, all of them.

Thinking has an understructure and underpinnings.

I never considered myself a performance artist.

Most wonderful things are unconscious.

Public art existed all along, but ecological art just naturally grew out of my thinking and writings in that area for years. I didn't get involved in it; I started what then became a movement.

People are always fighting reality until it's pushed down their throats.

I went through about six or seven painting methods just to see what I didn't want to do. And then I got off the wall, and went into the environment.

Anything important has to be almost invisible. And underrated. So the understructure should be underrated, but strong enough to hold the earth.

We use up words as we use up images. We use up everything, and that's good, because it makes us grow.