Portraits Quotes - Page 15

• THING TO TRY: If you are asked to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist, describe in precise detail, the features of the police sketch artist. This is one of the rare instances where two people can do one self-portrait.

  Demetri Martin

  Artist, Self, Two

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• Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Art, Book, Hero

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• He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.

  Tanith Lee

  Gestures, Paint, Made

  Tanith Lee (2014). “Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition”, p.57, Wildside Press LLC

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• I imagine John Watson thinks love’s a mystery to me, but the chemistry is incredibly simple and very destructive. When we first met, you told me that a disguise is always a self portrait, how true of you, the combination to your safe – your measurements. But this is far more intimate. This is your heart, and you should never let it rule your head. You could have chosen any random number and walked out of here today with everything you worked for. But you just couldn’t resist it, could you? I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage. Thank you for the final proof.

  Mark Gatiss

  Heart, Thinking, Simple

  "Sherlock (TV Series) - A Scandal in Belgravia". www.imdb.com. 2012.

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• Fellow-Christians, do let us study the Bible portrait of the humble man. And let us ask our brethren, and ask the world, whether they recognize in us the likeness to the original.

  Andrew Murray

  Christian, Humble, Men

  Andrew Murray (2016). “Humility: The Beauty of Holiness”, p.27, Gideon House Books

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• Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Writing, Artist

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories”, p.46, H. P. Lovecraft

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• Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.

  Michael Crichton

  Smart, Done, Renaissance

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• If I were an opera singer, I"d have sung you an aria. If I were an artist, I would have painted your portrait. But cooking is what I'm best at.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Artist, Cooking, Opera

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• The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

  Salvador Dali

  People, Effort, True Life

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• Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another atfifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.

  H. G. Wells

  Time, Men, Eight

  H G Wells (2004). “The Time Machine (Sparklesoup Classics)”, p.6, Sparklesoup LLC

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• Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Writing, Myth, Draws

  "What Is Literature?: And Other Essays".

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• A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Men, Personality, Aging

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• It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Men, Expression, Intellectual

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “Collected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer”, p.194, Simon and Schuster

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• Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.

  Michael Faraday

  Science, Chemistry, Electricity

  Michael Faraday, Christian Friedirich Schoenbein (1899). “The letters of Faraday and Schoenbein 1836-1862: With notes, comments and references to contemporary letters”

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• I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.

  Georg Baselitz

  Art, Hair, Work Out

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• I see the President almost every day. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face with its deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.

  Walt Whitman

  War, Sadness, Eye

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• Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Writing, Intelligent, People

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• People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

  Robert Mapplethorpe

  Photography, People, Waiting

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Echoes, People

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• If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind--if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight--that is a beautiful experience.

  Yousuf Karsh

  Beautiful, Photography, Feelings

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• When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, People, Alive

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• A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Real, Doe

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• In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Country, Law

  Robert Adams, Maren Stange (1990). “Paul Strand: essays on his life and work”

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• According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

  Alain de Botton

  Love, Men, Body

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• It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think - and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Love, Photography, Lying

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1954). “Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford: the unpublished letters of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford”

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