Quotessence
Home / Topics / Calligraphy Quotes

Calligraphy Quotes

Browse 46 quotes about Calligraphy.

Calligraphy Quotes

“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.”

PhilosophyWisdomMeditationTaoPicture BookCalligraphy
Book:Calligraphic Meditation for Everyday Happiness
Create image

“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.”

PhilosophyWisdomMeditationTaoPicture BookCalligraphy
Book:Calligraphic Meditation for Everyday Happiness
Create image

“He was a prince of the Ming dynasty. His family was very rich and very powerful. His father and grandfather were painters and famous calligraphers, and little Zhu Da had inherited their gift. So just imagine, one day, when he wasn't even eight years old yet, he drew a flower, a simple lotus flower floating on a pond. His drawing was beautiful that his mother decided to hang it in their salon. She claimed that thanks to the drawing you could feel a fresh little breeze in the huge room and you could even smell the flower's perfume when you walked by the drawing. Can you imagine? Even the perfume! And his mother was surely not an easy person to please... With both a husband and a father who were artists, she must have seen a few things by then...”

PainterChinesePrinceCalligraphyMing DynastyCalligrapher
Book:Hunting and Gathering
Create image

“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.”

WayYearsFirstsCountryBeautifulFoundInspiringClassDesignCollegeTenComputerDecidedHistoricalPracticalsSubtleFascinatingCaptureApplicationInstructionReedsMacintoshStanford UniversityCalligraphyMacintosh Computers
Author:Steve Jobs
Create image

“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.”

MenHumansFactsBodyIndividualHuman BeingsCenturyFieldsMaterialsExcitingSizeWideDrawingSymbolsLandscapePrimitiveExtensionsSculptureObservingTwentieth CenturyFacetsCalligraphyPrimitive ManTots
Author:Barbara Hepworth
Create image

“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.”

IfsWayWritingTryingFirstsBeautifulTimeNatureSimpleAttentionFirst TimeDiscoveringStraightforwardSkillfulBeginnersSimple WaysCalligraphy
Book:Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Create image

“These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.”

KnowsHandsAgeFormPurposeBlackAttitudeMiddleStonesGreekMelancholyPeculiarRevealingMiddle AgesGothicCalligraphy
Author:Victor Hugo
Create image

“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. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.”

IfsYearsMightCoursesClassClearWonderfulImpossibleCollegeComputerWindowMultipleLooking BackLooking ForwardDotsMacsTypographyConnecting The DotsStanford UniversityFontsCalligraphyDropping OutPersonal ComputersTypefaces
Author:Steve Jobs
Create image

“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.”

PeopleWayPersonsLongDifferentVoiceInterestLevelsStruggleDesignAmountCrossesBelieverDialogueLong WayFusionDifferent LevelsEnrichingCalligraphy
Author:Marina Warner
Create image

“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.”

KnowsFeelsWritingMadeFactsUsedCultureReadingSpeakLanguageStepsRootsFunny ThingsArtworkDialectReading WritingCalligraphy
Author:eL Seed
Create image

“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”

ShouldLittlesBlackBrainKnownFirePaperShould HaveSightLakesDreadBurnedFogSpidersLockersCrawlingShould Have KnownCylindersCalligraphy
Author:Alexandra Adornetto
Create image

“I do shodo magic,” Dali said. “I curse through calligraphy. I have to write the curse out on a piece of paper and I can’t move while I do it. One smudge, and I might kill the lot of us.” Oh good. “But don’t worry.” Dali waved her arms. “It’s so precise, it usually doesn’t work at all.” Better and better.”

WritingSaidI CanMightMovingWorryPiecesMagicArmsPaperCursePreciseCalligraphy
Book:Magic Strikes: A Kate Daniels Novel: 3
Create image

“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.”

WayGivingPersonsBookHardMomentsFeelingsCoursesSpaceToo MuchSonHard WorkHappeningsGive MeAbsolutesMadSellingEmptinessMy SonBlankAvoidingRestlessCrumbsCalligraphyBlank Space
Author:Paulo Coelho
Create image

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.”

YearsHumansMayLongHandsFormLanguageExistenceStageSourceRootsMachinesIndependentRemainsSurpriseDelightTinyCraftsBranchesVisualsSoilHungTypographyTrue KnowledgeHuman LanguageCalligraphy
Author:Robert Bringhurst
Create image