“But who does not see that the work goes beyond the one who created it? It marches before him and he will never again be able to catch up with it, it soon leaves his orbit, it will soon belong to another, since he, more quickly than his work, changes and becomes deformed, since before his work dies, he dies.”
Source: Abstract Painting (1964), p. 105
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Michel Seuphor 9
designer, draughtsman, painter 1901–1999Related quotes

“He was a lawyer before he worked his way up to pimping.”
Source: The Black Company (1984), Chapter 1, “Legate” (p. 23)

This quote was actually composed by Louis Nizer, and published in his book, Between You and Me (1948).
Misattributed
Variant: He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
Robert Machol in: " Now it is to be cited or perish http://books.google.com/books?id=wHphHUhDk7wC&pg=PA491." New Scientist. Vol. 67, nr. 964. August 28, 1974. p. 491

“A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.”
“No man's more fortunate than he who's poor,
Since for the worse his fortune cannot change.”
Fragment 23
Fabulae Incertae

Source: What is Man? (1938), p. 180
Context: When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse.

“He only half dies who leaves an image of himself in his sons.”
Muore per metà chi lascia un' immagine di se stesso nei figli.
II. 2.
Pamela (c. 1750)

Winter, An Ode. The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787), p. 355