"Moonlight is sculpture."
Sculpture quotes
202 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside sculpture — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought."
"The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves."
"These days I am obsessed by sculpture! I believe I have glimpsed a complete renovation of that mummified art."
"As picture teaches the colouring, so sculpture the anatomy of form."
"This building is like a book. Its architecture is the binding, its text is in the glass and sculpture."
"We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture... We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it into gravel, we can shape it into glory."
"Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks."
"The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away."
"Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself."
"Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing."
"The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone."
"The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair Across the tide to see her image there: Then looking up and round the prospect wide, When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried."
"A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty."
"Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture."
"The more the marble wastes, The more the statue grows."
"A great sculpture can roll down a hill without breaking."
"It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand."
"Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith, have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better it would have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind."
"Madam de Stael pronounced architecture to be frozen music; so is statuary crystalized spirituality."
"Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting."