“I haven't always been understood. As a footballer, as coach and also for what I did after all that. But OK, Rembrandt and Van Gogh weren't understood either. That's what you learn: people go on bothering you until you're a genius.”

—  Johan Cruyff

reported in Johan Cruyff (2016). My Turn: The Autobiography.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I haven't always been understood. As a footballer, as coach and also for what I did after all that. But OK, Rembrandt a…" by Johan Cruyff?
Johan Cruyff photo
Johan Cruyff25
Dutch association football player 1947–2016

Related quotes

John Banville photo

“After all, who knows what the distant past was like? About Kepler and Copernicus, people often say, You captured the period so well! I always want to ask, How do you know? You weren't there either.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Doris Lessing photo

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”

Doris Lessing book The Four-Gated City

The Four-Gated City (1969)

Phillip Guston photo

“I maintain that the frustration is an important, almost crucial, ingredient. I think that the best painting involves frustration. The point about the late Rembrandt [paintings] is not that it's satisfying but on the contrary that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really, what he [Rembrandt] has done is to eliminate any plane - anything between that image and you. The Van Dyck [portrait] hasn't. It says [only] I'm a painting. The Rembrandt says: I am not a painting, I am a real man. But he is not a real man either. What is it then, that you are looking at?”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), p. 97

Pat Spillane photo

“There are people who go to the Hague for war crimes – I tell you this, some of the coaches nowadays should be up for crimes against Gaelic football.”

Pat Spillane (1955) Gaelic football player

Spillane on Jim McGuinness. His team won the 2012 All-Ireland. The Irish Times https://archive.is/20121208223707/www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2012/0827/1224323032489.html

“It is, after all, our imagination that makes us human. Vincent van Gogh asked, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?””

Will Gompertz (1965) British journalist

To which the answer is, I would have thought, boring, bordering on pointless.
Think Like an Artist (2015)

William Saroyan photo

“I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, "That's that, where do we go from here?"”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

.
Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (1961)

Timothy McVeigh photo

“I am sorry these people had to lose their lives. But that's the nature of the beast. It's understood going in what the human toll will be.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

Letters published in the Buffalo News (10 June 2001)
2000s

Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo

“People don't want to be understood — I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

Confucius photo

“I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects, Chapter I

David Fincher photo

“You can either look at your career as the things you're going to leave behind, and they have to be executed flawlessly and you have to know exactly what it is that you're doing. Or you can be realistic about the fact that you're going to learn as you practice what you do.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

About the film, The Social Network
The Curious Case of David Fincher (2007)

Related topics