Eva Zeisel Quotes

• The pleasure of making things beautiful or useful involves your feelings as well as your thinking. When your original sketch evolves into a tangible, three-dimensional object, your heart is anxiously following the process of your work. And the love involved in making it is conveyed to those for whom you made it.

  Eva Zeisel

  Beautiful, Heart, Thinking

  49 Copy quote

• If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas.

  Eva Zeisel

  Creativity, Mean, Yield

  9 Copy quote

• I think with my hands. I design things to be touched-not for a museum. A piece is ready when it has the shape of something to cherish.

  Eva Zeisel

  Thinking, Museums, Hands

  "Prolific" by Judith Thurman, www.newyorker.com. December 18, 2006.

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• To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.

  Eva Zeisel

  Mean, Creative, Negative

  9 Copy quote

• I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.

  Eva Zeisel

  Mother, Brother, Cousin

  16 Copy quote

• Beautiful things make people happy.

  Eva Zeisel

  Beautiful, People, Making People Happy

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• The designer must understand that form does not follow function nor does form follow a production process. For every use and for every production process there are innumerable equally attractive solutions.

  Eva Zeisel

  Doe, Use, Designer

  "Eva Zeisel obituary" by Tanya Harrod, www.theguardian.com. January 15, 2012.

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• The playful search for beauty.

  Eva Zeisel

  Eva Zeisel, Margaret Carney (1999). “Lost Molds and Found Dinnerware: Rediscovering Eva Zeisel's Hallcraft : New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, New York : February 11, 1999-September 9, 1999”

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• I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

  Eva Zeisel

  Want, Novelty, Designer

  8 Copy quote

• If you think of beautiful things, you’re not sad.

  Eva Zeisel

  Beautiful, Thinking, Beautiful Things

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• I am a maker of useful things.

  Eva Zeisel

  Makers, Useful Things

  "Prolific" by Judith Thurman, www.newyorker.com. December 18, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

• When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.

  Eva Zeisel

  Hands, Bird, Clay

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• My designs are meant to attract the hand as well as the eye.

  Eva Zeisel

  Eye, Hands, Design

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• When you begin your work, nothing exists. When it is finished it looks as if it just happened, spontaneously, effortlessly, convincingly. It looks as though it had been there all along.

  Eva Zeisel

  Looks, Happened, Finished

  4 Copy quote

• Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

  Eva Zeisel

  Vocabulary, Curves, Design

  8 Copy quote

• I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind.

  Eva Zeisel

  Be Kind, Grotesque, Shock

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• When I design something, I think of it as a gift to somebody else.

  Eva Zeisel

  Thinking, Design

  4 Copy quote

• Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

  Eva Zeisel

  Novelty, Aesthetic, Commerce

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• I don't know the difference between working and not working.

  Eva Zeisel

  Differences, Knows

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• I made the things particularly because I wanted them to see the world.

  Eva Zeisel

  World, Made, Wanted

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• When I met my designs in the market of a remote village in the West Indies, or in the airport restaurant in Zurich, I felt like the mother of many well-behaved children.

  Eva Zeisel

  Mother, Children, Airports

  8 Copy quote

• My work is very bodily. It's not a shell, but a body.

  Eva Zeisel

  Shells, Body

  4 Copy quote

• Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.

  Eva Zeisel

  Hands, Clay, Woods

  7 Copy quote

• Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.

  Eva Zeisel

  Home, Men, Design

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

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• Art has more ego to it than what I do.

  Eva Zeisel

  Art, Ego

  "Eva Zeisel's Century", www.wired.com. December 12, 2006.

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