Josef Albers Quotes

It's the only dish I serve my craziness for color in. ~ Josef Albers

I prefer to see with closed eyes. ~ Josef Albers

A painter paints because he has no time not to paint. ~ Josef Albers

My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know. ~ Josef Albers

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends. ~ Josef Albers

I paint the way I spread butter on pumpernickel. ~ Josef Albers

Therefore art means: you have to believe, to have faith, that is, cultivate vision. ~ Josef Albers

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience. ~ Josef Albers

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference! ~ Josef Albers

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting. ~ Josef Albers

The role of art for me is the visualization of attitude, of the human attitude towards life, towards the world. ~ Josef Albers

I start from experience and read ... always between polarities - loud and not-loud, young and old, spring and winter. If I can make black and white behave together instead of shooting at each other only, I feel proud. ~ Josef Albers

Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it. ~ Josef Albers

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely. ~ Josef Albers

What has been said does not simply belong to us. ~ Josef Albers

In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually. ~ Josef Albers

Usually, we think of an apple as being red.
This is not the same red as that of a cherry or tomato.
A lemon is yellow and an orange like that of its name.
Bricks vary from beige to yellow to orange,
and from ochre to brown to deep violet.
Foliage appears in innumerable shades of green.
In all these cases the colors named are surface colors.

In a very different was, distant mountains appear uniformly blue,
no matter whether covered
with green trees or consisting of earth and rocks.
The sun is glaring white in daytime, but it is full red at sunset.
The white ceiling of houses surrounded by lawns or the white-painted
eaves of a roof on a sunny day appear in bright green, which is
reflected from the grass on the ground.
All these cases present film colors.

They appear as a thin, transparent, translucent layer between the eye and an object, independent of the object's surface color. ~ Josef Albers

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers. ~ Josef Albers

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. ~ Josef Albers

The purpose of art is to re-present nature, not represent it. ~ Josef Albers

It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see. ~ Josef Albers

You see, I have in my teaching - I always say I've done it for a hundred years and have had thousands of students - I have always spoken against just falling onto your knees for so-called accidents, I mean a result you are not responsible for. ~ Josef Albers

In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness. ~ Josef Albers

On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich. ~ Josef Albers

Calm Down
what happens
happens mostly
without you. ~ Josef Albers

I was for years in the yellow period, you know. ~ Josef Albers

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training. ~ Josef Albers

Easy-to know that diamonds-are precious, Good-to learn that rubies-have depth, But more-to see that pebbles-are miraculous. ~ Josef Albers

I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one. ~ Josef Albers

Every perception of color is an illusion, we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another. ~ Josef Albers

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see. ~ Josef Albers

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art. ~ Josef Albers

The aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth. ~ Josef Albers

Whether something 'has color' or not is as hard to define verbally as are such questions as, 'What is music?' or 'What is musical? ~ Josef Albers

When I came from horizontal vertical straight all old stuff then suddenly I go also again in curved lines. And there I submit to changes in the intensity of my hand leading a tool, you see. ~ Josef Albers

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward. ~ Josef Albers

And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything. ~ Josef Albers

Apprentice is the beginner - the first years you work in a craft in the European sense you are an apprentice. That takes 3 or 4 years. Then you are a journeyman. You can go from one master to another and learn other tricks and other secrets. ~ Josef Albers

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. ~ Josef Albers

I am not interested in repetition. I don't want to reach the point from where I wouldn't know how to go further. It's good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed. ~ Josef Koudelka

What distinguishes - in both senses of that word - contemplation is rather this: it is a knowing which is inspired by love. "Without love there would be no contemplation." Contemplation is a loving attainment of awareness. It is intuition of the beloved object. ~ Josef Pieper

My work has no theme. I don't care if my photographs get published, and I have no interest in the news. But the invasion of Prague was not news, it was my life. ~ Josef Koudelka

We were all born to the same world but with much greater circumstance
but with these two hands and what I have been given
I will build so much more
from Dexterity ~ K.R. Albers

Patience is not the indiscriminate acceptance of any sort of evil: "It is not the one who does not flee from evil who is patient but rather the one who does not let himself thereby be drawn into disordered sadness." To be patient means not to allow the serenity and discernmet of one's soul to be taken away. Patience, then, is not the tear-streaked mirror of a "broken" life (as one might almost think, to judge from what is frequently shown and praised under this term) but rather is the radiant essence of final freedom from harm. Patience is, as Hildegard of Bingen states, "the pillar that is weakened by nothing. ~ Josef Pieper

I release Josef, who collapses to my feet, and confesses not just to all war crimes at Auschwitz but also for being responsible for the colossal mistakes New Coke and Sex and the City 2. ~ Jodi Picoult

[T]o know means to reach the reality of existing things[.] ~ Josef Pieper

My father ran the gamut: a favorite of his was Josef Hofmann, but there was also Friedman, Rachmaninoff, Godowsky, Lhevinne, Moiseiwitsch, Paderewski, etc. ~ Marc-Andre Hamelin

The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refused to have anything as a gift. ~ Josef Pieper

I have no way to ask about that. I have no elegant way of stepping into your heart to ask about that without tracking in filth. So I will wait, someday, when you want to tell me.. tell me then. I'll wait until then. ~ Josef Kucera

A longing for excitement can be satisfied without external means within oneself: For creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know. ~ Anni Albers

Happiness, ... even the smallest happiness, is like a step out of Time, and the greatest happiness is sharing in Eternity. ~ Josef Pieper

As soon as the cold became uncomfortable, Eli had opened his shirt and had a nice long chat with the burn on his chest. Karon was happy to help them stick it to the ice and wind spirits, and he cheerfully kept the air around Eli as warm and dry as a smokehouse.
"I only wish it didn't reek of sulfur," Josef said, pressing up the mountainside. "I'd almost rather deal with the cold."
"Well, don't let me stop you," Eli huffed, though even he looked a little green. "Who am I to stand between a man and his frostbite? ~ Rachel Aaron

I worry that independence will never feel safe again. ~ K.R. Albers

The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshiped the other genocide, Josef Stalin. It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. ~ Frederick Forsyth

Wonder is defined by Thomas [Aquinas] in the Summa Theologiae [I-II, Q. 32, a. 8], as the desiderium sciendi, the desire for knowledge, active longing to know. ~ Josef Pieper

It is possible to pray in such a way that one does not transcend the world, in such a way that the divine is degraded to a functional part of the workaday world ... then it is no longer devotion to the divine, but an attempt to master it. ~ Josef Pieper

The problem is that I'm Josef Weber's friend. but Reiner Hartmann is my enemy. So what do I do, now that they are the same man? ~ Jodi Picoult

Their is beauty everywhere on earth. ~ Josef Skvorecky

Happiness and joy are not the same. For what does the fervent craving for joy mean? It does not mean that we wish at any cost to experience the psychic state of being joyful. We want to have reason for joy, for an unceasing joy that fills us utterly, sweeps all before it, exceeds all measure. ~ Josef Pieper

MAN, IF YOU ARE BETTER, EVERYTHING WILL BE BETTER IN THE WHOLE OF YOUR FATEFULLNESS. ~ Josef Zezulka

I always have loved the Stradivarius. My teacher, Josef Gingold, he had a Stradivarius. As a treat, he would put it under my chin and let me play a few notes, and I remember that feeling of the overtones, the complexity of the sound. It's like a great wine. ~ Joshua Bell

I believe a lot in instinct. One should never dull it by wanting to know everything. One shouldn't ask too many questions but do what one does properly, never rush, and never torment oneself. ~ Josef Sudek

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. ~ Franz Kafka

That's what's so inspiring about music, that it excites and conveys all the wealth of a man's thoughts and at the same time creates a ravishing human solidarity. ~ Josef Bor

For me what photographers say about their photos doesn't have any importance. For me it is just enough to look at the pictures. Many times - for the boring pictures - people have to say so many things about them to show you there is something to them when many times there is nothing. ~ Josef Koudelka

All just order in the world is based on this, that man give man what is his due. ~ Josef Pieper

In a lovely book called On Hope, Josef Pieper explores Thomas Aquinas' theology of hope along these lines: the hopeful person is by definition a wayfarer (viator), because the virtue of hope lies midway between the two vices of despair (desperatio) and presumption (praesumptio). What despairing persons and presumptuous persons have in common is that they aren't going anywhere, they are fixed in place: the despairing because they don't think there's anywhere to go, the presumptuous because they think they have reached the pinnacle of achievement. ~ Alan Jacobs

Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell. ~ Josef Pieper

If God really became incarnate, and if His Incarnation can with justice compel man to change his life,then we have no alternative but to conceive of this Incarnation as something which is still present and which will remain present for all future time ... What happens in the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist is something for which all religions of mankind have exressed longing, dimly sensed was coming, and as a rule even prefigured- the physical presence of the divine Logos made man, and the presence of his sacrificial death, in the midst of the congregation celebrating the mysteries. ~ Josef Pieper

To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole. ~ Josef Pieper

Josef Stalin once said that 'Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.' Let us correct this: Ingratitude is a horrible disease belongs to the callous rocks! A grateful dog is a being much more developed than an ungrateful man! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal. ~ Josef Pieper

Those who imagined, in 1989, that never again would an intellectual be caught defending the Leninist Party, or advocating the methods of Josef Stalin, had reckoned without the overwhelming power of nonsense. In the urgent need to believe, to find a central mystery that is the true meaning of things and to which one's life can be dedicated, nonsense is much to be preferred to sense. For it builds a way of life around something that cannot be questioned. No reasoned assault is possible against that which denies the possibility of a reasoned assault. ~ Roger Scruton

I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc. ~ Gerhard Richter

But I used to think," Josef says quietly, "that there are some weeds that are just as beautiful as flowers."
(pg 134) ~ Jodi Picoult

I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not 'photographing', in order to keep the eye in practice. ~ Josef Koudelka

The delight we take in our senses is an implicit desire to know the ultimate reason for things, the highest cause. The desire for wisdom that philosophy etymologically is is a desire for the highest or divine causes. Philosophy culminates in theology. All other knowledge contains the seeds of contemplation of the divine. ~ Josef Pieper

Your lifemate is either not born or" - she smirked at him mischievously - " she's probably one of Gregori's daughters."
He groaned and slapped his forehead with his palm. "A curse on you forever for uttering those words, for putting that thought out into the universe. Don't even think that, let alone say it aloud. Can you imagine Gregori Daratrazanoff as a father-in-law? Sheesh, Skyler, you really do want me dead. ~ Christine Feehan

The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire ... One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure. ~ Josef Pieper

Every man can change, no matter how long it takes;
patience and persistence. ~ K.R. Albers