Calligraphy Quotes

I never did calligraphy ... But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It's part of the syndrome of modernism ... It's part of that asceticism. ~ Paul Rand

Mum said no one has ever called me by my first name so I've always assumed that even as a baby they could tell I wasn't an Arabella, a name with loops and flourishes in black-inked calligraphy; a name that contains within it girls called Bella or Bells or Belle - so many beautiful possibilities. No, from the start I was clearly a Beatrice, sensible and unembellished in Times New Roman, with no one hiding inside. ~ Rosamund Lupton

I opened my backpack and checked my supplies: some enchanted rope, my curved ivory wand, a lump of wax for making a magical shabti figurine, my calligraphy set, and a healing potion my friend Jaz had brewed for me a while back. (She knew that I got hurt a lot.) ~ Rick Riordan

Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares. ~ Charles Yu

Broad-Based Education:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It
was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

- Commencement address, Stanford University,
June 12, 2005 ~ George Beahm

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ~ Isabel Allende

Craig inscribed something in the journal and Bob walked over to study the entry. "Does the name Bob Ford mean anything to you?

Craig dipped his quill in the ink bottle and scripted cursively on a brown blotter. "Is that your actual name or your alias?"

"Actual," said Bob, and he grinned with delight when he saw the name recorded in Craig's elegant calligraphy. "Pretty soon all of America will know who Bob Ford is. ~ Ron Hansen

I couldn't know about my culture, my history, without learning the language, so I started learning Arabic - reading, writing. I used to speak Arabic before that, but Tunisian Arabic dialect. Step by step, I discovered calligraphy. I painted before and I just brought the calligraphy into my artwork. That's how everything started. The funny thing is the fact that going back to my roots made me feel French. ~ EL Seed

If you dance, you'll feel more joyful. Just thinking isn't going to make you feel better. Think about how joyful you'll feel as you dance. Don't repeat the foolishness of putting off dancing as you debate whether dance will really bring you joy. We feel joy as soon as we dance. Everything is like that. ~ Ilchi Lee

I've always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned calligraphy. I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another. But that's all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling of absolute emptiness, in which not a single crumb of love exists. ~ Paulo Coelho

Just above our terror, the stars painted this story in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy. ~ Aberjhani

Calligraphy is an art form that uses ink and a brush to express the very souls of words on paper. ~ Kaoru Akagawa

She went as a "formal apology": she wore a floor-length evening gown we found at Goodwill for ten dollars, and she had a sign around her neck, written in calligraphy, which said, I'm sorry. ~ Jenny Han

In some Arab art exhibitions that have happened, there's always this idea that the East is more traditional; they show a lot of works on calligraphy and religion. ~ Massimiliano Gioni

Possibly the strangest book ever made, the 'Codex Seraphinianus' is an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, with illegible calligraphy - it is written in an alphabet no one can understand - and surreal drawings of odd beasts and machines. ~ Russell Smith

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. ~ H.G.Wells

Lettering creates readable art that comes to life, displaying a quirky, whimsical nature. ~ Peggy Dean

Addison spoke in calligraphy while everyone else talked in scribbles. ~ Shawn Martin

Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape. ~ Barbara Hepworth

We had Chinese artists that would put in elements for the Chinese audience like the calligraphy actually means something so the audience when they read it they'll understand. So there were definitely little things we were able to do that specifically leveraged the artists' talents. ~ Jennifer Yuh Nelson

On pristine parchment I draw with my skis calligraphic lines of joy, writing poems of movement. ~ Patricia Robin Woodruff

Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically. ~ Plato

Look at a skilled blacksmith working steel. To the untrained eye, he's merely repeating the same hammer blows, but anyone trained in the art of calligraphy knows that each time the blacksmith lifts the hammer and brings it down, the intensity of the blow is different.
The hand repeats the same gesture, but as it approaches the metal it understands that it must touch it with more or less force. It's the same thing with repetition: it may seem the same, but it's always different. The moment will come when you no longer think about what you're doing. You become the letter, the ink, the paper, the word. ~ Paulo Coelho

The white marble surface was inlaid with semiprecious stones in seamless floral designs and in chaste calligraphy, shaped stones, jeweled stones, delicate and free-figured. The surface ran cool and smooth. Traceries of black Koranic figures covered the longer sides of the tomb with a smaller group on top. My hand moved slowly over the words, feeling for breaks between the inlay and marble, not to fault the craftsmen, of course, but only to find the human labor, the individual, in the wholeness and beauty of the tomb. ~ Don DeLillo

Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door. ~ Richard Hamming

WONDER WITHOUT WILLPOWER
Love's way becomes a pen sometimes writing g-sounds like gold or r-sounds
like tomorrow in different calligraphy
styles sliding by, darkening the paper
Now it's held upside down, now beside
the head, now down and on to something
else, figuring. One sentence saves
an illustrious man from disaster, but
fame does not matter to the split tongue
of a pen. Hippocrates knows how the cure
must go. His pen does not. This one
I am calling pen, or sometimes flag,
has no mind. You, the pen, are most sanely
insane. You cannot be spoken of rationally.
Opposites are drawn into your presence but
not to be resolved. You are not whole
or ever complete. You are the wonder
without willpower going where you want. ~ Rumi

If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was. ~ Pablo Picasso

I had this desire to understand Islam better and then focus on the beauty of Arabic and Islamic cultures. And one of the first things to emerge was Arabic calligraphy, which was instantly inspiring. ~ Craig Thompson

Calligraphy, a spiritual art that has been forgotten in favor of an emotionless keyboard. ~ Stefan Boldisor

I'm much more interested in lesser-known eccentrics and characters and performers. Like Matthew Buchinger, who was born in Germany in 1674, had no arms or legs and yet did magic, and had 14 kids, and made the most extraordinary calligraphy. ~ Ricky Jay

When I first started doing these roasts in the mid '90s, they were a lost art, like jousting or calligraphy. But I feel like roasts help tame the room and let off steam ... It's like it's all being handled by professionals. ~ Jeff Ross

If you are drawn to the refined, take up calligraphy or grow a bonsai. ~ Laurie A. Helgoe

It is possible to think of fragrance existing before a flower was created to contain it, and so it is that God created the world to reveal Himself, to reveal Mercy.
Once or twice a year, perhaps three times, a woman visits the garden, her face ancient, the eyes calm but not passive as she approaches the rosewood tree and begins to pick and examine each fallen leaf. Whether she is in possession of her full mental faculties, no one is sure. Perhaps she is sane and just pretending madness for self-protection. Many decades ago - long before the house was built, when this place was just an expanse of wild growth - she had discovered the name of God on a rosewood leaf, the green veins curving into sacred calligraphy. She picks each small leaf now, hoping for a repetition of the miracle, holding it in her palms in a gesture identical to prayer. The life of the house continues around her and occasionally she watches them, following the most ordinary human acts with an attention reserved by others for much greater events. If it is autumn, she has to remain in the garden for hours, following the surge and pull of the wind as it takes the dropped foliage to all corners. Afterwards, as the dusk begins to darken the air, they sit together, she and the tree, until only the tree remains.
What need her search fulfils in her is not known. Perhaps healing had existed before wounds and bodies were created to be its recipient. ~ Nadeem Aslam

When I was young, I didn't want to do traditional painting and calligraphy. I deliberately wanted to separate from my father so I could feel I existed myself. ~ Cai Guo-Qiang

The word WANTED slithered across the top of each image in elegant calligraphy. The drawing of Criminy was spot-on, but the one of me was more than a little imaginative. I looked like an evil seductress, some sort of vampy witch-queen.
I liked it.
I wanted a copy for my wagon. ~ Delilah S. Dawson

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. ~ Steve Jobs

They say a man's inspiration is visual, but for a woman, it's the narrative.
Abandon both the narrative and the visual. Close your eyes, measure your breath.
Dead weight is sloughed off, dust swept away, forms dissolve into one atmosphere.
The rib cage opens, the lungs fill, the breast rises.
Waves sweep up the body on their swell, rocking it rhythmically.
Feet planted, the back arches, the pelvis reaches forward.
Oxygen kindles a flame, sprawling through the belly, and gathering in a warm blaze.
The hand reaches to meet the sensation.
Calligraphy spills from the inkwell.
Open your eyes, sharpen your focus, and exclaim:
There are no separations. ~ Craig Thompson

The story in that particular spot was an ancient history story, and we wanted to give it a historical feeling, which was why we used a historical calligraphy scroll come to life. ~ Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Ding! Ding! Ding! I tapped the brass bell in rapid succession until Violet bustled in from the back room, wearing the blue-and-white pinafore that was the SugarWerks's uniform and a frown that was not. The same age as Nic and I, Violet wore her amethyst hair spiked and a brass gearring stud on the left side of her nose. On one set of knuckles, BAKE was tattooed in elaborate black calligraphy; CAKE was on the other. Today she had an aquamarine bow pinned to the top of her head, a silver cupcake and crossbones marking the spot between the two loops of ribbon. ~ Lisa Mantchev

Here was the remainder of ten thousand educations, the bones drifted down to this depth. It was the fossil of one's country. She ached, because the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy. ~ Chris Cleave

Writing beautifully - calligraphy - was China's first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to write beautifully, and then you painted. After mastering those twin skills, you could move on to writing poetry, but many chose to remain just calligraphers, a highly appreciated art form in China. Another ~ Mark Kurlansky

But for anything to be alive, it required motion : the current must run, the record must turn, a person must leave or find another path. Without movement or change, the world became nothing more than a stale copy, and this was the trouble with Ba's elegant calligraphy, his patient life, it was frozen in time. ~ Madeleine Thien

My life is a room filled with love letters and goodbye notes. ~ Jenim Dibie

When I hear his voice, I see his words written in calligraphy. ~ Shawn Martin

But the life he now led no longer resonated with the echo of past moments of exhilaration, other than the trilling of birds at dawn, or the grand calligraphy of clouds. Therefore, when the little girl began to play, the pain he felt courted a sorrow he no longer knew still lived inside him, a brief reminiscence of the cruelty of pleasure. ~ Muriel Barbery

I could be worse, you know."
"How?" I asked, teasing.
"I mean, I have a work of calligraphy over my toilet that reads, 'Bathe yourself in the comfort of God's words,' Hazel. I could be way worse."
"Sounds unsanitary," I said. ~ John Green

A lot of Chinese martial arts films were based on Chinese martial arts novels. And these novels created a world of putting history, calligraphy, and martial arts into one. ~ Donnie Yen

Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. ~ Barack Obama

His velvet brush dips deep and lingers there in the warm inkwell of her endless desire. The ink of passion flows for him tonight, so he may show her how it feels for his muse to be so truly needed by an ardent lover.

His hunger to write poems of love's power upon the warm supple parchment of her skin, secret words that only she can comprehend until his brush runs dry and he returns to dip again in ink made by the gods for calligraphy of wanton desire. ~ Brianna Hughes

Women today are wanting to work in the workforce but also come home and learn to bake cupcakes, to do calligraphy, to knit a blanket for their baby, to 3-D print something. ~ Brit Morin

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass. ~ Joan Miro

What were your kisses, then? Vengeance?"
The wall of flames shimmered away. Anger still flared inside me, but now it was mixed with something else. Something I couldn't push away, despite fury. Want.
"They were nothing," I lied. "They meant nothing."
I didn't look at him. And then, a bloom of cold erupted beside me and Amar was at my side. His fingers traced a secret calligraphy along my arms.
"Nothing at all? ~ Roshani Chokshi

I shall have twenty cats and talk to them all," she said, picking up the volume of poetry. "My cats and I shall have fish every day for dinner." Her imagination taking flight, she finished, dropping the book into the box, "And I shall memorize every line in this book and paint it in calligraphy on my living room walls. ~ Regina Doman

I used to do calligraphy, and I'm afraid that has lapsed, but I've always been interested in book printing. ~ Alice Waters

Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation.

This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid.

We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to ~ Cullen Thomas

Wabi means spare, impoverished; simple and functional. It connotes a transcendence of fad and fashion. The spirit of wabi imbues all the Zen arts, from calligraphy to karate, from the tea ceremony to Zen archery. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

Do these past days mean nothing?" he asked, so gently that my weak self curled around his words.
But I would no longer be weak. I tapped into that power in my veins and a shimmering wall of flames sprang up between us. Amar jumped back, shocked and then…amused.
"A little ruthlessness is to be admired, but it's cruel to play with a powerless heart."
"Crueler still to promise equality and hide a person's true self."
"I thought it was best for you," he repeated.
"Strange how something that only affected me was decided by you."
Amar's smile turned cold. "My promises were true. You seek to punish an illusion without fully knowing. What were your kisses, then? Vengeance?"
The wall of flames shimmered away. Anger still flared inside me, but now it was mixed with something else. Something I couldn't push away, despite fury. Want.
"They were nothing," I lied. "They meant nothing."
I didn't look at him. And then, a bloom of cold erupted beside me and Amar was at my side. His fingers traced a secret calligraphy along my arms.
"Nothing at all?"
My heart twisted. I reached forward, my hands tangling in his hair as I kissed him. It was a kiss meant to devour, to summon war. And when I broke it, my voice was harsh:
"My kisses mean nothing."
"Cruel queen," he murmured, tilting my head back. His lips skimmed down my neck. Amar's hands gripped my waist, before tracing the outline of my hips. Heat flared through my body. But just ~ Roshani Chokshi

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky-
the moon seals it. ~ Yosa Buson

Once there was a dictator. He drove millions to various kinds of deaths, by war, in prison, or simply in harsh deserts farming their lives away. He destroyed temples, burned books, and ruined the art of calligraphy. He wrote terrible poetry and forced everyone to learn it, so destroying the literary taste of one quarter of humanity. He remained a warrior even as Chairman. He was at his best as a warrior, because as a warrior, he was fighting for his people, dreaming for them. After that, he only ground them down. But I forgive him for saying one beautiful thing:
'Women hold up half the sky.'
Chairman Mao Tse Tung ~ Geoff Ryman

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country ... I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this ... It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. ~ Steve Jobs

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke. ~ Vikram Seth

But I was wrong. I should have known it wasn't owver, couldn't be over quite easily. No sooner was Xavier out of sight than a little cylinder of paper fell from the top of my locker. As I unrolled it, I knew I'd see black calligraphy crawling across it like a spider. Dread settled around me like a fog as the words burned into my brain:
The Lake of Fire awaits my lady ~ Alexandra Adornetto

I am not a great believer in dialectical struggle. I am much more of a fusion person. I see it as a dialogue, or trialogue, or polylogue: many, many, many voices, going back a long way. The cultural picture is much more mutually enriching at many different levels, manufacturers ... absolutely, design and calligraphy. It's an amazing amount of cross-interests between people. ~ Marina Warner

Who am I? is not a question about your job or bank balance. Don't be satisfied with rational or formal answers. Ask yourself seriously and honestly, again and again, and, sooner or later, you'll hear the voice of your soul. The true answer will come to you, breaking through the thick curtain of your ego, which is made up of your name, job, personality, and similar things. ~ Ilchi Lee

The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

I started to turn toward the closest bus stop. Alex turned the other way. "Suivez-moi," he commanded. So I followed. "Bon.Je pensais que nous irions-"
"Alex."
He stopped. "Ella."
"Don't do that, the immersion thing."
"Mais, c'est tres important."
"Alex."
"Ella."
"Please.I know you do this with other linguistic losers, but it makes me feel like I should have a great big L lipsticked onto my forehead in some swirly French calligraphy."
"Do you often contemplate decorating yourself in such a manner?"
I took a quick look down.I was wearing Sienna's turtleneck again, but my own jeans. There was a large blue sea horse from the art museum fountain running from my knee to the crease of my thigh. "Yeah," I admitted. "I do."
"Quelle horreur!" he declared, eyes round in mock distress.
"Casse-toi."
He let out a bark of laughter that sounded just like a seal. "Tres bien, Mademoiselle Marino. Got any more?"
"A couple.Frankie gave me a copy of How to Offend the French when I managed to get a B in 1B last year."
"Well,I never trade insults on a first date. Not that kinda guy. But after two or three..."
I liked that he'd said "date," instead of "tutoring session." Even if it wasn't and he totally didn't mean it. I couldn't help it. ~ Melissa Jensen

Just as writing can become calligraphy when it's creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement - the art of living. ~ H.E. Davey

Proofs are to mathematics what spelling (or even calligraphy) is to poetry. Mathematical works do consist of proofs, just as poems do consist of words. ~ V. I. Arnold

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. ~ Steve Jobs