Portraits quotes
284 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside portraits — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me."
"At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer."
"The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process."
"Portrait The world spreads out on either side no farther than the heart is wide."
"In the past there were too many portraits of Chairman Mao in China. They were hung everywhere. That was not proper and it didn't really show respect for Chairman Mao."
"To anyone who has served in Washington, there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you're painted into a corner, then you're hung out to dry and, finally, you're framed."
"Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth."
"One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists."
"If the face appears, the picture is inevitably a portrait and the expression of the face will dictate the viewer's response to the body."
"Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait."
"He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward."
"In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature."
"Who can take Death's portrait? The tyrant never sat."
"A remarkably revealing portrait."
"To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation."
"My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages."
"Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally."
"I do mostly portraits. So it's just people's faces, not really any ideas."
"A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation."
"[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits."
