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Composition Quotes

Browse 653 quotes about Composition.

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Composition Quotes

“Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic.”

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Book:The nude: a study in ideal form
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“Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.”

MeanUseUsedArtistRecordsCenturyDesignPhotographyInventionFrightenedAccurateCompositionFormalNineteenth CenturySymmetrySnapshotsDegas
Book:The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art
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“Composition is what's similar between being photographer and director. As a photographer, you're sort of doing everything - you're directing the lights and you're framing and you're moving around. The hardest thing to learn as a director is how cameras have to move. You have to have patience, you have to learn how to look through the lens and then you have to learn to combine all of the compartments into one great image.”

LooksLightMovingDirectorsCamerasPhotographerHardestCompositionLensesHardest ThingHaving PatienceFraming
Author:Russell James
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“Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.”

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Author:Donna Tartt
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“Science does not enter a chaotic society to put order into it anymore, to simplify its composition, and to put an end to controversies. It does enter it, but to add new uncertain ingredients... to all the other ingredients that make up the collective experiments. When scientists add their findings to the mix, they do not put an end to politics; they add new ingredients to the collective process.”

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Author:Bruno Latour
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“Deterrence failed completely as a guide in setting rational limits on the size and composition of military forces, spurring an insatiable arms race with a reckless proliferation of the most destructive power ever unleashed, tailored for delivery by a vast array of vehicles to a stupefying array of targets.”

ForceRaceMilitaryArmsLimitsSizeGuidesSettingRationalSettingsDestructiveTargetVehicleCompositionRecklessDeliveryInsatiableProliferationUnleashedMilitary ForceArms RaceTailoredDeterrenceDestructive Power
Author:George Lee Butler
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“To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting.”

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Author:Jim Woodring
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“In 1966, while working on a feature about a Picasso exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, I recorded the pre-opening preparations and observed a moment: One of the cleaners stopped, puzzled, in front of the Picassos. I think that this is an image that can be universally understood, but with a grain of salt. I never chose this image in edits before because it seemed to me that it felt posed-the composition was a little too perfect. But, believe me, it was a lucky moment.”

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Author:Micha Bar-Am
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“We may say with truth and meaning, that governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition; and believing as I do, that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights and especially that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient.”

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Book:The writings of Thomas Jefferson: being his autobiography, correspondence, reports, messages, addresses, and other writings, official and private
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“One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.”

WritingDoeSeemsReadingNaturalNumbersCuttingFlowAimAddRhythmCompositionAdequateRevisionExuberanceRevisingSmall Words
Author:Jacques Barzun
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“High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)”

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Book:Entertaining Ideas: Popular Philosophical Essays, 1970-1990
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“The biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, andy more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages.”

MenWorldHumansUseOrderLanguageNaturalPerfectCommonSpeechModelsUnderstoodCurrentsGreekBiblicalCompositionSovereigntyHuman ExperienceSaying NoHebrewNatural Order
Author:J. I. Packer
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“No man should be viewed as having more to offer the world than another. We are all equals and every human being has something of value in their composition which makes them unique, just as every country has their own unique resources to share with the world. Never discount somebody based on material wealth, for true wealth is what cannot be seen. Never discount a country by what they can't provide your country, while their resources may benefit other lands in need.”

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Author:Suzy Kassem
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“Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you must have gathered, is the smile I wear.”

ThinkingWaterDarknessPiecesTreeLonelinessShapesMoonElementsOceanWinterFollowingRefuseBeachIndifferenceRealisingShellsCompositionRidersDesolatePine TreesDriftwoodWinter Moon
Author:Angela Carter
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