Foreground Quotes

• My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Real, Writing, Backgrounds

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• There is no foreground or background, only a continuity of interlacing relationships

  Lyonel Feininger

  Life, Backgrounds, Continuity

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• Start with the foreground. Compositions fail when the foreground is treated as an afterthought.

  Robert Genn

  Failing, Composition, Treated

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• Moving ourselves to the background and others to the foreground is evidence that the (spiritual) search is achieving its purpose.

  Arianna Huffington

  Spiritual, Moving, Purpose

  Arianna Huffington (2003). “Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

  Constantin Stanislavski

  Pain, Perspective, Important

  Constantin Stanislavski (2013). “Building A Character”, p.166, Routledge

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• I gravitate toward the larger worldview questions such as, Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? What does it mean to know another person? To love someone? Of course, those questions are sort of in the background as I'm playing with language in the foreground, but those are the informing questions.

  Aaron Belz

  Mean, Doe, Language

  "Cartographer of Word Galaxies". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. September 24, 2013.

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• Avoid distant views, paint objects close up. If the foreground is well done the distance will take care of itself.

  Charles Webster Hawthorne

  Distance, Views, Done

  Richard Mühlberger, Charles Webster Hawthorne (1999). “Charles Webster Hawthorne”, University of Washington Press

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• It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.

  Sean Penn

  Country, Moving, Mean

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of lifes wisdom.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Sympathy, Wisdom, Pain

  Wisława Szymborska (1981). “Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems”, p.205, Princeton University Press

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• If there's no background, no foreground, no opposition, no complements, then there's no change becasue there's no subject and object.

  Frederick Lenz

  Taoism, Backgrounds, Complement

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• The cloud controls the light ... It is the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground shine.

  Alice Meynell

  Clouds, Light, Shining

  Alice Meynell (2013). “The Essential Alice Meynell Collection”, p.122, eBookIt.com

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• I've gradually risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground.

  Marvin L. Cohen

  Class, Rose, Achievement

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• It's very important in a leadership role not to place your ego at the foreground and not to judge everything in relationship to how your ego is fed.

  Ruth Simmons

  Judging, Ego, Important

  "I Was Impossible, but Then I Saw How to Lead". Interview with Adam Bryant, www.nytimes.com. December 3, 2011.

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• The foreground in a picture is always unattractive... Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Dream, Art, Distance

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• The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture

  Raymond Chandler

  Art, Men, Creative

  Raymond Chandler (1987). “Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler”, Delta

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• Ideas' can be only in the distant background of a work of art, something like a very low horizon. In the middle distance and foreground... there shouldn't be any 'ideas' visible.

  Mu Xin

  Art, Distance, Ideas

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• This book will prove the following ten facts: 1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there. 2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch. 3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity. 4. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, the result is a family fight. 5. Music does not always sooth the troubled beast. 6. An Englishman's home is his castle. 7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male. 8. One black eye deserves another. 9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm. 10. It pays to increase your word power.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Book, Home, Eye

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• What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

  Margaret Atwood

  Wall, Two, Hair

  FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Jul 25, 2012

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• I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lasts, Found, Scoundrels

  "The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 11: Collected Plays and Chesterton on Shaw". Book edited by Denis J. Conlon, 1989.

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• Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Art, Creativity, Reality

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs”, p.133, Vintage

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• There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

  Chaim Potok

  Religious, Strong, Backgrounds

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• My picture of the world is drawn in perspective and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as three-penny bits. I don't really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing.

  Frank P. Ramsey

  Stars, Believe, Science

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• Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.

  Lewis Thomas

  Distance, Moon, Blue

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Whenever the strength of a belief strongly steps into the foreground, we must infer a certain weakness of demonstrability and the improbability of that belief.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Weakness, Steps, Belief

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• So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Differences, Careers, Wife

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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