Best Motifs Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“The natural world is built upon common motifs and patterns. Recognizing patterns in nature creates a map for locating yourself in change, and anticipation what is yet to come.”

Change Anticipation Permaculture Motifs Fractals Map Golden Ratio Biomimicry Changeability Locate Located Patterns In Nature Yet To Come

Book:ChangeAbility: How artists activists and awakeners navigate change

Source: ChangeAbility: How artists activists and awakeners navigate change

“I want to make beautiful paintings. But I don't make beautiful paintings by putting beautiful paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn't work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising.”

Want Beautiful Strong Painting Paint Surprising Canvas Motifs Beautiful Paintings

Author:Albert Oehlen

“Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.”

Writing Lost Novel Childhood Illusion Expectations Titles Maturity Passages Thrill Clash Great Writers Motifs

Author:Andre Maurois

“The way one sees is also dependent upon one's emotional state of mind. This is why a motif can be looked at in so many ways, and this is what makes art so interesting.”

Way Mind Art States Interesting Emotional Dependent State Of Mind Motifs

Author:Edvard Munch

“One day I noticed that I could go on working my art motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me.”

Art Matter Light Might Work Sun Goes On Needed One Day No Matter What Weather Motifs

Author:Georges Braque

“Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.”

Thinking Giving Littles Different Left Interest Study Subjects Months Highest Rivers Edges Angle Bending Motifs Plentiful Different Angles

Author:Paul Cezanne

“The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder. By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.”

Way Should Firsts Made Artist Felt Simple Understood Simplicity Details Spectators Superfluous Elimination Beholder Motifs Simple Ways

Author:Alfred Sisley

“Carl Orff's Carmina Burana has the ability to take you from placidity to power in one sonic breath. It is music of dignity and strength, with primitive, energetic passages, evoking absolute beauty from the simplest of phrases. It brings up something that has everything to do with significance - squeezing joy and motif that you just can't drop - it stays with you.”

Joy Ability Music Dignity Absolutes Breaths Phrases Significance Passages Primitive Simplest Energetic Squeezing Motifs Dignity And Strength

Author:Robert Genn

“While knowledge of tools and the love of motif may be in your backpack, and all mountains may be measured by their previous heroes, art must exist for you in a place beyond the judgment of others.”

May Art Nature Hero Mountain Judgment Tools Motifs Judgment Of Others

Author:Robert Genn

“Obsession with self is the motif of our time.”

Self Obsession Our Time Motifs

Author:Charles Krauthammer

“In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.”

Humans Lost Creative Wall Solitude Poetic Sparks Ornaments Decorating Motifs Creative Spark

Book:Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

“By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.”

Years Firsts Made Would Be Felt Style Design Building First Time Decades Architecture Accepted Orthodoxy Revolt Stirring Postmodernism Motifs

Author:Martin Filler

“I should like to take the wind and water and sand as a motif and work with them, but it has to be simplified in most cases to colour and force lines, just as music has done with sound.”

Should Done Force Sound Water Lines Cases Wind Colour Sand Motifs

Author:Arthur Dove

“[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis.”

Writing Art Authority Definitions Familiar Cruelty Thrill Brutality Persuasive Declaring Citing Motifs Artaud

Author:Antonin Artaud

“the 'total overpaintings' developed... through incessant reworking. The original motif peeped through the edges. Gradually it vanished completely.”

Originals Edges Incessant Motifs

Book:Arnulf Rainer: an exhibition

Source: Arnulf Rainer: an exhibition

“For me a work of art must be an elevated interpretation of nature. The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life. In landscape or seascape, I love above all the poetic motif.”

Has Beens Art Purpose Ideals Landscape Poetic Interpretation Works Of Art Motifs

Author:William-Adolphe Bouguereau

“My art in the last period has all been in small format, but my paintings have become even deeper and more spiritual, speaking truly through colour. Feeling that because of my illness I would not be able to paint very much longer, I worked like a man obsessed on these little 'Meditations' (a long series of small paintings he made during the last years of his life, with as main motif the schema of a face, ed.). And now I leave these small but, to me, important works to the future and to people who love art.”

“I am well aware that there is such a great craving in man for heroism and the heroic, and that hero worship forms not a small motif in his complex. I am also aware that, unless man believes in his own heroism and the heroism of others, he cannot achieve much or great things. We must, however, take proper care that we do not make a fetish of this cult of hero-worship, for then we will turn ourselves into votaries of false gods and prophets.”

Men Believe Wells Care Form Turns Achieve Hero Worship Complexes Great Things Prophet Heroic Heroism Cult Craving Fetish False Gods Motifs Hero Worship

Author:Aung San

“I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.”

Ifs Thinking Book Hard Stories Notion Various Theme Preoccupation Motifs

Author:George Saunders

“The motif of death plays an important role the human psyche in connection with archetypal and karmic material.”

Humans Important Play Roles Materials Connections Motifs Human Psyche

Author:Stanislav Grof

“I watched Westerns from the time I was a girl. My dad was a big Western fan. I always loved Clint Eastwood movies and Westworld, where the guy gets trapped in a western-themed amusement park. The western motif was fascinating to me.”

Bigs Guy Girl Fans Dad Western My Dad Parks Fascinating Trapped Amusement Motifs Amusement Parks Elise

Author:Kimberly Elise

“Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images.”

Art Stories School Film Used Sound Directors Approach Conscious Inspired My Favorite Mood Backgrounds Painter Novelists Stem Urban Art School Stanley Hitchcock Wilder Motifs Bergman

Author:David Lynch

“I believe that eyes are very important motifs. Thats something that can discern the peace and love.”

Believe Important Eye I Believe And Love Peace And Love Motifs

Author:Yayoi Kusama

“In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.”

Art Facts Poetry Values Literature Importance Aim Structure Sake Symbols Primaries Interconnected Motifs

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.”

Source: Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962

“In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange.”

Doe Use Body Strange Painting Female Series Drawing Naked Caves Female Body Motifs Minotaur Bison

Author:Werner Herzog

“One of the basic motifs in fairy tales is that you find the poor and unfortunate along the side of the road, and when they beg for help, if you give it to them, you end up succeeding. If you don't give it to them, you end up being turned into a frog or something. It's something that's been around for thousands of years, a concept that's been around for thousands of years.”

Ifs Giving Years Ends Helping Sides Poor Succeed Concepts Tales Fairy Fairy Tale Unfortunate Frogs Motifs

Author:George Lucas

“The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.”

Humans Children Past Mother Animal Christianity Catholic Human Experience Icons Mother And Child Motifs

Author:Robert Neelly Bellah

“For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.”

“Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.”

Order Lines Greater Achieve Movement Balance Perfection Repeats Dancer Again And Again Repetition Motifs Degas

Author:Kenneth Clark

“History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.”

Book States Whole Past Written Lakes Yearning Essays Living In The Past Motifs

Author:James Ellroy

“I shot many scenes of Hamburg, albums full of postcard motifs, and I discarded almost all of them. I ride my bike through Hamburg every day. I go shopping here, I go to the doctor - and yet I no longer have the eye for telling stories about this damn city, even though I love it.”

Stories Eye Cities Scene Shots Doctors Albums Damn Shopping Bike Telling Stories Discarded Postcards Motifs

Author:Fatih Ak?n

“Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There's nothing 'natural' about one's home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and all the electronic equipment - we're living inside commercials.”

Kind Home Natural Tvs Technique These Days Fabric Equipment Furniture Presentation Anthology Advertisers Appliances Motifs Furnishings

Book:Conversations

Source: Conversations

“By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.”

Giving Doe Real Lines Taken Color Ordinary Harmony Combination Symphony Pretext Motifs

Author:Paul Gauguin

“The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.”

Seems Style Possibility Unconscious Categories Motifs

Author:Terence McKenna

“We've tried to use some visual motifs [in Beauty and the Beast]. As far as the cinematography and the lensing and all that, we are presenting a different view into that world. It's a little sleeker, but we're keeping the gothic feel underneath it.”

World Feels Littles Different Use Views Beast Visuals Gothic Presenting Cinematography Different Views Motifs

Author:Brian Wayne Peterson

“This is about objects, not motifs. The photo is only a substitute for an object; it is unsuitable as a picture in its customary sense.”

Objects Substitutes Motifs

Author:Bernd Becher

“When a sculptor creates a sculpture, a writer writes a novel, or a painter paints a motif on a canvas, he needs talent and expertise. But to be successful in his endeavor, he also needs to have the passionate feeling that he wants, at all costs, to create a work of art which, in his head, constantly demands to be accomplished. The same also applies to developing board games or card games.”

“I've always been intrigued by things that insinuate femininity, so in my designs, something like a flower is never about the fact that it's a flower. It's more about what that repetitive motif implies.”

Facts Design Flower Femininity Intrigued Repetitive Motifs

Author:Erdem Moral?oglu

“Whenever I work on the computer, I have folders and you know how you always give everything working titles, if you have a riff or a motif or a chord progression or a lyric written on a page, it's just a line or a word or something so I always give everything a working title when I'm making a folder.”

Ifs Knows Giving Lines Know How Written Computer Pages Titles Chords Progression Motifs Folders

Author:Page Hamilton

“One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface in which many repetitions and motifs recur and mirror one another. This is very much reflected within the stories: they have borders within borders, repeated motifs which change. They have their feet in oral conventions, and for the mnemonics, the storyteller needs to have a structure in order to remember the stories.”

Needs Book Stories Remember Order Feet Mirrors Structure Metaphor Surface Flying Borders Conventions Repetition Storyteller Carpet Woven Motifs

Author:Marina Warner

“One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.”

Trying Kind Book Matter Stories Form My Own Subjects Critical All Kinds Titles Chapters Fifteen Rhyme Repetition Carpet Subject Matter Tapestry Mirroring Motifs Epigraphs

Author:Marina Warner

“Echo is very important to me. I love the repetition of motifs, or the slight alteration of what's been said before. This is part of how one creates a mood, a psychological caul, in fact, around the reader.”

Said Important Facts Reader Mood Psychological Echoes Repetition Alterations Motifs

Author:Teju Cole

“I like the idea of it as a trickster motif. You know like you're kind of just messing around with people's memories of songs.”

People Knows Kind Ideas Song Memories Like You Motifs Tricksters

Author:DJ Spooky

“On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another.”

People Kind Whole Hands Sound Music Is Notion Strings Composer Symphony Classical Music Borrowed Intriguing Quartets Motifs Sampling String Quartets

Author:DJ Spooky

“I wanted to do is kind of invoke that and then dive into that kind of repetition as a DJ thing because DJing you hear beats, like "boom, boom, boom, bap, bap." You know hip hop, house, techno. So how do you translate between those electronic motifs and the motifs of the landscape itself? That is what I wanted to go for.”

Knows Kind Wanted House Beats Hip Hop Hips Landscape Hops Translate Repetition Djs Invoke Techno Motifs

Author:DJ Spooky

“I am a sur le motif painter, always in-the-field, with a French easel that folds up into a box, with backpack straps on it. Many of the sites I haunt are desolately beautiful. Few other people go there. I am gloriously alone, unmolested, and absorbed in attempting to see what I am looking at.”

People Beautiful Fields Boxes Painter Site Attempting Folds Motifs

Author:James Howard Kunstler

“The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew's cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo's choice to know the truth. It's a beautiful, beautiful story.”

Thinking Knows Important Stories Beautiful Film Choices Truth Is Cost Consequence Thirds Scary Cinema Theme Larry Andrew Motifs

Author:Keanu Reeves

“It's true the punk fashion itself was iconographic: rips and dirt, safety pins, zips, slogans, and hairstyles. These motifs were so iconic in themselves - motifs of rebellion.”

Fashion Safety Rebellion Punk Dirt Slogans Rip Pins Iconic Hairstyles Zips Motifs Safety Pins

Author:Vivienne Westwood

“This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.”

Humans May Ends Seems Reading Conditions Fashion Willing Agree Notion Human Life Composition Refrain Untrue Motifs Symmetrical

Author:Milan Kundera

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