Composition Quotes - Page 10

• When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?

  David Hume

  World, Stones, Coherence

  David Hume (1824). “The Philosophical Works of David Hume ... Containing Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Essays on the Immortality of the Soul, Suicide ... &c. A New Edition”, p.6

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• Ladies and gentlemen, if some of the leading artists in a civilization see a man urinating in another man's mouth and see composition and lighting and do not see their civilization being pissed upon, we are in trouble.

  Dennis Prager

  Christian, Religious, Artist

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• We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Reading, Light, Space

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU – The Man, The Philosopher & The Trailblazer (Illustrated): Biographies, Memoirs, Autobiographical Books & Personal Letters (Including Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada…)”, p.133, e-artnow

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• Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, Writing, Simple

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.389, Penguin

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• A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, Spirit, Study

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.38, Рипол Классик

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• The 'open text' often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers.

  Lyn Hejinian

  Poetry, Literature, Process

  Lyn Hejinian (2000). “The Language of Inquiry”, p.43, Univ of California Press

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• This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Science, Ideas, Years

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.210, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition. I asked myself the other day, "Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?" I couldn't think of anyone.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Thinking, Issues, Speed

  "On Writing Speedily", first published in The New York Times Book Review (1986); republished in "Miles Gone By : A Literary Autobiography" by William F. Buckley Jr., (p. 405), 2004.

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• A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the pox content which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Drinking, Wine, Character

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• For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.

  Antonio Damasio

  Ocean, Discovery, Joy

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• A journalist is supposed to present an unbiased portrait of an event, a view devoid of intimate emotions. This is impossible, of course. The framing of an image, by its very composition, represents a choice. The photographer chooses what to show and what to exclude.

  Alexandra Kerry

  Views, Choices, Portraits

  Alexandra Kerry (2008). “Notes from the Trail: Presidential Politics from the Inside Out”, p.8, Rodale

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• I try when I'm writing to fill my head and my ears with all sorts of stuff and then let it settle and filter through. At a certain point it seems like fruitless activity because you're taking a lot of time and not seeming to get anything. And then, slowly, you realize you've actually digested elements and that your thinking is being freed up and the way you build up compositions is changed as a result of what you've been listening to.

  Peter Gabriel

  Writing, Thinking, Listening

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• Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra's vision.

  Peter Ustinov

  Flower, Epic, Artist

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• A visual understanding of great composition and how to use a camera and expensive lenses can be learned, but drive and a real hunger for making photos and telling stories... I don't think that part can be learned. You either have that inside, or you don't.

  Aaron Huey

  Real, Thinking, Understanding

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• Women of fashion and character--I do not mean absolutely unblemished--are a necessary ingredient in the composition of good company; the attention which they require, and which is always paid them by well-bred men, keeps up politeness, and gives a habit of good-breeding; whereas men, when they live together without the lenitive of women in company, are apt to grow careless, negligent, and rough among one another.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Fashion, Character, Mean

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• My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Stars, Life Changing, Sky

  Charles A. Lindbergh (1978). “Autobiography of Values”, Harcourt

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• I started when I was nine. Really, everything I know about color theory, composition, drawing, and painting, I learned when I was a kid.

  David Salle

  Kids, Color, Drawing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Depression, Exercise, Night

  Edgar Allan Poe (2006). “The Portable Edgar Allan Poe”, p.488, Penguin

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• Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.

  Joanna Newsom

  Writing, College, Years

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The artist reserves the right to remove a blot on the landscape, to change positions of things, to suit his composition, providing only that he does not transgress the laws of probability.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Artist, Law, Doe

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• When I'm editing, it's such a tough call, and I get challenged on it all the time. You've got to go with your gut - sometimes when you look at a photograph, you just know it's the shot. Sometimes it's about the connection, or about the simplicity of the composition.

  Russell James

  Editing, Simplicity, Connections

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Composition is what's similar between being photographer and director. As a photographer, you're sort of doing everything - you're directing the lights and you're framing and you're moving around. The hardest thing to learn as a director is how cameras have to move. You have to have patience, you have to learn how to look through the lens and then you have to learn to combine all of the compartments into one great image.

  Russell James

  Moving, Light, Cameras

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.

  Kenneth Clark

  Photography, Mean, Artist

  Kenneth Clark (1973). “The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art”

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• Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Thinking, Greek

  Kenneth Clark (1956). “The nude: a study in ideal form”, M J F Books

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• Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.

  Kenneth Clark

  Drama, Long, May

  Kenneth Clark (1988). “Leonardo da Vinci”, Viking Pr

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