Portraits Quotes - Page 5

• To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.

  Honore de Balzac

  Live Life, Passion, Eye

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• And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,
  Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay
  And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:
  I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

  William Butler Yeats

  Women, Phoenix, Mind

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.127, Wordsworth Editions

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• Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

  Blaise Pascal

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Add

  Blaise Pascal (2009). “Thoughts”, p.21, Lulu.com

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• Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

  Milan Kundera

  Self, Long, Hatred

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• We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait (as we have conceived it), in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  People, Details, Demand

  Pamela Hansford Johnson (2012). “Night and Silence, Who is Here?”, p.117, Pan Macmillan

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• My early self-portraits appeared effortlessly and seemed like equivalents for my deeper emotions. Many critics remarked that the images had an almost other-worldly haunting presence. For me, they were simply my own reality at that point in my life. What I was trying to reveal was my inner soul in all its fragile complexity. Without knowing it, I was trying to peel back the layers that shroud and bind us all as we struggle to reveal our own authentic selves.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Struggle, Reality

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• Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Currency, Stamps, Statutes

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.250, Harvard University Press

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• I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Real, World, Painting

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Barbara Haskell, Museum of Fine Arts (Museum of New Mexico) (1985). “Georgia O'Keeffe, Works on Paper: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe”, Museum of New Mexico Pr

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• I think of all the choices I never knew. And those I let be made for me - to please, from fear, for love. Where did they disappear to, those choices that I never made? They are all part of who I am. They are the legacy I leave behind, they are the finished portrait of myself I cannot change.

  Liv Ullmann

  Thinking, Who I Am, Choices

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• Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances.

  George Crabbe

  Dream, Please, Resemblance

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• Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre.

  George Sand

  Dream, Thinking, Years

  Gustave Flaubert, George Sand (1999). “Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert & George Sand”, Harvill Press

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• [Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?

  Queen Elizabeth II

  Teeth, Sitting

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• There is no self-portrait of me.

  Gustav Klimt

  Self, Portraiture, Self Portrait

  Gustav Klimt, Ankriktip, Abelia Serotina (2016). “Gustav Klimt Artworks”, p.46, Book and Magazine

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• There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.

  Matthew Modine

  Discipline, Photograph, Release

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• It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.

  LeRoy Neiman

  Stars, Feet, Saws

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• Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.

  Tim Walker

  Mean, Needs, Photographer

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• An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

  W. H. Auden

  Men, Self, Ego

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• I'm very particular who I work with. I'm not interested in portraying women with a cliched, generic look. I'm interested in a model who I can take a portrait of.

  Tim Walker

  Looks, Not Interested, Portraying

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• That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

  Jemima Kirke

  Kids, People, Looks

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

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• Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.

  James Sallis

  Cutting, Men, Crime Novels

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• The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Two, Different, Portraiture

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• Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait.

  Lori Earley

  Mean, Reflection, Self

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• The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.

  Jacob Epstein

  Artist, Order, Bitter

  Jacob Epstein, (2013). “Let There Be Sculpture”, p.39, Read Books Ltd

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• A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Men, Judging

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.142, Penguin

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• In The Moon, Come to Earth Philip Graham takes us on the best kind of journey, as he simultaneously reveals the fascinating city of Lisbon--its neighborhoods, its writers, its customs, its cuisine--and offers an intimate portrait of his beloved family. With his far-reaching intellect Graham is the ideal travelling companion, and The Moon, Come to Earth is a beautiful and surprising book.

  Margot Livesey

  Beautiful, Book, Moon

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