Quotes about contour (50 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figuratives or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Gilbert Perlein and Bruno Cora, Yves Klein: Long live the Immaterial, Delano Greenidge Edition, New York, 2001. p. 74
from posthumous publications

Painting

“To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation…”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Book of Delusions (1936)

World , Sadness , Solitude , Memory

“The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Introduction (p. xxiv)
1815 - 1830, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1822 – 1824)

“We reject the dissent's contention that our approach, by "largely return[ing] the task of defining the contours of Eighth Amendment protection to political majorities," leaves "‘[c]onstitutional doctrine [to] be formulated by the acts of those institutions which the Constitution is supposed to limit,'" […] By reaching a decision supported neither by constitutional text nor by the demonstrable current standards of our citizens, the dissent displays a failure to appreciate that "those institutions which the Constitution is supposed to limit" include the Court itself. To say, as the dissent says, that "‘it is for us ultimately to judge whether the Eighth Amendment permits imposition of the death penalty,'" (quoting Enmund v. Florida) -- and to mean that as the dissent means it, i. e., that it is for us to judge, not on the basis of what we perceive the Eighth Amendment originally prohibited, or on the basis of what we perceive the society through its democratic processes now overwhelmingly disapproves, but on the basis of what we think "proportionate" and "measurably contributory to acceptable goals of punishment" -- to say and mean that, is to replace judges of the law with a committee of philosopher-kings.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Stanford v. Kentucky (1989) (plurality part, case later overruled by Roper); decided June 26, 1989.
1980s

Death , Law , Penalty , Quotes

“I feel as if I am practicing some precise psychological art, one that is ancient and poorly understood in our culture; or as if I'm learning a psychological science that helps me map the contours of consciousness itself.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 4
Context: I don't feel "possessed" or "invaded during sessions. I don't feel that some superspirit has "taken over" my body. Instead I feel as if I am practicing some precise psychological art, one that is ancient and poorly understood in our culture; or as if I'm learning a psychological science that helps me map the contours of consciousness itself.

Art , Feeling , Learning , Science

“That is our generation’s task -- to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American. Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time. For now decisions are upon us and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years and 40 years and 400 years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Second Inaugural Address (January 2013)

Life , Way , Decision , Time

“The inner world is as real as the outer world. One ought to be conscious of that. It, too, has its landscape, contours, possibilities, its boundless regions.”

Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) Jewish diarist

World

“In twenty to thirty thousand years memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the wind, the rain and the jungle erode and cover stone. The contours of the very continents change—and glaciers come and go, and a city of twenty thousand years before is under miles of earth or miles of water.”

Fredric Brown book Letter to a Phoenix

Letter to a Phoenix (p. 337)
Short fiction, From These Ashes (2000)

Water , Memory , Change

“The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

Heart

“He knew me in all the ways that truly mattered: the shape of my fears, the contours of my dreams.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Fear , Dreams , Way

“A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

World

“All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, and contours. You feel the inspiration of its possibilities and the wonder of its mysteries.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Color , Feeling , Soul , Sense

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them. … Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

[By-Line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades by Ernest Hemingway, White, William, 1967, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 364]
Source: By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades

Learning , Country

“The investigation of the form and brightness of the rings or rays surrounding the image of a star as seen in a good telescope, when a diaphragm bounded by a rectilinear contour is placed upon the object-glass, though sometimes tedious is never difficult. The expressions which it is necessary to integrate are always sines and cosines of multiples of the independent variable, and the only trouble consists in taking properly the limits of integration. Several cases of this problem have been completely worked out, and the result, in every instance, has been entirely in accordance with observation. These experiments… have seldom been made except by those whose immediate object was to illustrate the undulatory theory of light. There is however a case of a somewhat different kind; which in practice recurs perpetually, and which in theory requires for its complete investigation the value of a more difficult integral; I mean the usual case of an object-glass with a circular aperture. The desire of submitting to mathematical investigation every optical phænomenon of frequent occurrence has induced me to procure the computation of the numerical values of the integral that presents itself in this inquiry: and I now beg leave to lay before the Society the calculated table, with a few remarks upon its application.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Star , Mathematics , Problem , Light

“I want so much for my work to grow forth out of the material, just as in nature the plants grow forth out of the earth, which corresponds to their character. In the print 'Lebensfreude' [Joy of living] I worked for the most part with my finger, and the effect I hoped for was achieved. There is hidden in the print a bit of wantonness, in the representation as well as in the boldness of the technique. If I were to make the "ragged and moving" contours "correctly" in the academic sense, this effect would not nearly be achieved.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

in a letter to his friend Gustav Schiefler, 1906, in 'Gustav Schiefler and Christel Mosel', Emil Nolde: Das graphische Werk, vol. 2.; M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne, 1966-67, p. 8; as quoted in 'The Revival of Printmaking in Germany', I. K. Rigby; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p.50
Nolde described how the exhilarating new sense of collaboration with the medium had freed him from the constraints of traditional etching techniques and encouraged a bolder, freer expression
1900 - 1920

Hope , Nature , Sense , Joy

“Continental morality critics are plainly not without ethical views of their own—namely, views, broadly, about the good life for (some or all) human beings—since it is on the basis of these views that they criticize “morality.” Therefore, we need to understand the contours of the “morality” to which these critics object—for ease of reference, we will call it “morality in the pejorative sense” (MPS)—since it must be distinguished from the normative considerations that inform their critiques. … We can usefully divide Continental critics of morality into two camps … In the first camp are those thinkers who see the individual’s acceptance of morality as such as an obstacle to the individual’s flourishing; in very different ways, Nietzsche and Freud are these kinds of morality critics. In the second camp are those philosophers who see morality as among the “ideological” instruments that sustain socio-economic relations that are obstacles to individual flourishing. On this second account—most obviously represented by Marx and perhaps some of his descendants associated with the Frankfurt School.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

“Morality Critics”

Life , School , Way , Understanding

“A revolution determines, within the social body, an instantaneous process of reorganisation akin to the tumultuous combinations of the elements of a dissolved body that then tend to recompose themselves in a new form.1 This process cannot begin as long as a breath of life animates the old aggregation. As a result, the ideas that would reconstitute society will never take shape so long as a cataclysm, by dealing the old, decrepit society a mortal blow, has not freed the captive elements whose spontaneous and rapid fermentation will organise the new world. All the powers of thought, all the greatest efforts of intelligence are unable to anticipate this creative phenomenon that can break out at any given moment. One can prepare the cradle, but not bring to life the long-awaited being. Right up until the moment of death and rebirth, the doctrines [that will serve as the] bases of the future society remain vague aspirations, distant and hazy glimpses. They are like a blurred and floating silhouette on the horizon, the contours of which cannot be determined or grasped by human efforts.”

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) French socialist and political activist

On Revolution (1850)

Life , Death , World , Intelligence

“All art that is expressive has to be illusionistic. The raw material out of which art is built is not necessarily in itself potent; you must transform it. Contours, tactility, touch, color, intervals, that's all part of the concreteness of art. You have to make the concreteness expressive. That way you don't cater to taste. You resist sentimentality. Things in a picture can't remind you too much of anything else. You have to resist all that.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 24
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Art , Color , Way , Parting

“To comprehend the hysterical mass contagion that is the war on Trump it's essential to trace the contours of that other war, 'Operation Iraqi Freedom,' and the way it was peddled to the American public.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Beware The Atavistic Dynamics Undergirding Two American Wars, https://misesuk.org/2017/06/21/beware-the-atavistic-dynamics-undergirding-two-american-wars/" The Ludwig von Mises Centre For Property and Freedom, June 21, 2017.
2010s, 2017

War , Way , Freedom

“It is a false idea that drawing in itself can be beautiful. It is only beautiful through the truths and the feelings that it translates. The crowd admires artists, who, strong in subject, elegantly pen contours destitute of significance, and who plant their figures in pretentious poses. It goes into ecstasies over poses which are never seen in nature, and which are considered artistic because they recall the posturings of the Italian models who offer themselves at the studio door. That is what is generally called beautiful drawing. It is really only sleight-of-hand, fit to astonish boobies.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. V. Drawing and Color, p. 95-96

Truth , Beauty , Feeling , Idea

“Goethe's thinking was mobile. It followed the whole growth process of the plant and followed how one plant form is a modification of the other. Goethe's thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. Thereby his concepts became, if I may put it this way, intimately adapted to the process that plant nature itself goes through.”

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) Austrian esotericist

Lecture from August 30, 1921, trans. Craig Holdrege

Way , Nature , Thinking

“I have been deeply interested during the last ten years in the use of colour with form. I have applied oil colour – white, grey, and blues of different degrees of tone... I have been very influenced by the natural colour and luminosity in stones and woods and the change in colour as light travels over the surface contours. When I pierced the material tight through a great change seemed to take place in the concavities from which direct light was excluded. From this experience my use of colour developed.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1932 - 1946, The Studio 132:643', (1946), p. 279

Travel , Nature , Light , Change

“Against this view, it is still possible to identify some cultural continuities. Kitromilides himself alludes to some of them, when he mentions “inherited forms of cultural expression, such as those associated with the Orthodox liturgical cycle and the images of emperors, the commemoration of Christian kings, the evocation of the Orthodox kingdom and its earthly seat, Constantinople, which is so powerfully communicated in texts such as the Akathist Hymn, sung every year during Lent and forming such an intimate component of Orthodox worship...“ (Kitromilides 1998, 31). There are other lines of Greek continuity. Despite the adoption of a new religion, Christianity, certain traditions, such as a dedication to competitive values, have remained fairly constant, as have the basic forms of the Greek language and the contours of the Greek homeland (though its centre of gravity was subject to change). And John Armstrong has pointed to the “precocious nationalism” that took hold of the Greek population of the Byzantine Empire under the last Palaeologan emperors and that was directed as much against the Catholic Latins as against the Muslim Turks—an expression of medieval Greek national sentiment as well as a harbinger of later Greek nationalism. But again, we may ask: was this Byzantine sentiment a case of purely confessional loyalty or of ethnoreligious nationalism?”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

See Armstrong 1982, I74—8I cf. Baynes and Moss 1969, 119—27, and Carras 1983.
Source: The Nation in History (2000), p. 42-43.

Religion , Communication , Change , Loyalty

“I turned around and saw the crease on the bed where Camilla had been seated, the sensuous contour where her thighs and hips had sunk beneath the softness of the blue chenille bedspread. then I forgot Sammy, and wild with longing I threw myself upon my knees before the spot and kissed it reverently.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Kiss

“My work is anti-nature
The four-story mountain
You will not think form, space, line, contour
Just a suggestion of nature gives weight
light and heavy
light like a feather
you get light enough and you levitate”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

1970's, The Untroubled Mind', 1971

Mountain , Nature , Thinking , Light

“"Llorio, you are a woman of surpassing beauty, though you would seem to lack that provocative warmth which draws man to woman, and adds dimension to the character."
The Murthe responded curtly: "The quality you describe is a kind of lewd obsequiousness which, happily, has now become obsolete. As for the 'surpassing beauty,' it is an apotheotic quality generated by the surging music of the female soul, which you, in your crassness, perceive only as a set of pleasing contours."”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

"The Murthe", chapter 3
Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

Beauty , Music , Soul , Drawing

“All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the forms. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of foulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography', 1970, p. 280

Cars , Feeling , Memory

“But then, our way is the natural way ordained by god herself, whereas I have no idea whose set of social accidents and economic anomalies have contoured the ways of your odd and awkward land.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 2 (p. 177)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

God , Way , Idea , Nature

“We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote, in the 'Introduction' of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali - first publication in 1942 - Vision Press, London 1976, p. 2
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Life

“The evolution of earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide. But the mother cults did not mean freedom for women. On the contrary […] cult objects are prisoners of their own symbolic inflation. Every totem lives in taboo.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 8

Women , Religion , Birth , Freedom

“The second factor, equally important, is that of good continuation and good shape. The things which we see have a better shape, are bounded by better contours, than the holes which we might see but do not. Therefore, when in exceptional circumstances these conditions are reversed, we see the hole and not the things, as the shape of a gap between two projecting rocks with sharp profiles, which may look like a face, an animal, or some other object, while the shape of the rock disappears.”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 209

Animals

“Here we are at the antipode of automatism [invention from Surrealism] and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning way of reason. In the action of the machine, in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation.... [the] excess of ink flowing capriciously in thin black rivulets.... this line deflected by a sudden jar, this drop of water diluting a contour – all these are the sudden invasion of the unexpected in a world where it has a right to its proper place.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Motherwell is quoting here the comments of w:Henri Focillon on Japanese legends of 'accidentalism'
The Dada Painters and Poets, Schultz, Wittenborn, New York 1951, p. xxxvii
1950s

World , Way , Quotes , Water

“[U]p until now 'progress' has affected existing social realities only secondarily, modifying them as little as possible, according to the strict dictates of capitalist profitability. The important thing is that human beings are profitable, not that their lives be changed. As far as is possible, capitalism respects the pre-existing shape and contours of people's lives. Only grudgingly, so to speak, does it bring about any change. Criticism of capitalism as a contradictory 'mode of production' which is dying as a result of its contradictions is strengthened by criticism of capitalism as the distributor of the wealth and 'progress' it has produced.
And so, constantly staring us in the face, mundane and therefore generally unnoticed - whereas in the future it will be seen as a characteristic and scandalous trait of our era, the era of the decadent bourgeoisie - is this fact: that life is lagging behind what is possible, that it is retarded. What incredible backwardness. This has up until now been constantly increasing; it parallels the growing disparity between the knowledge of the contemporary physicist and that of the 'average' man, or between that of the Marxist sociologist and that of the bourgeois politician.
Once pointed out, the contrast becomes staggeringly obvious, blinding; it is to be found everywhere, whichever way we turn, and never ceases to amaze.”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)

Life , People , Way , Knowledge

“Proportion applies to sculpture as to painting; perspective determines the contour; chiaroscuro gives relief through the disposition of lights and shadows in their relationship with the background; color gives the appearance of life... The colorists, the men who unite all the phases of painting, have to establish, at once and from the beginning, everything that is proper and essential to their art. They have to mass things in with color, even as the sculptor does with clay, marble or stone; their sketch, like that of the sculptor, must also render proportion, perspective effect, and color.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

15 April 1851, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 230 – 231
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Life , Men , Art , Color

“Now, I should like to say something else to you about the connection with music, primarily that of Bach, i. e. the Fugue or, put more simply, the canon... It has a great deal in common with my own motifs, which I make turn on various axes too. Nowadays I have such a powerful sense of relationship, of affinity, that when I am listening to Bach I frequently get inspired and feel an overwhelming instinct for his insistent rhythm, a cadence seeking something of the infinite. In the Fugue everything is based on a single motif, often consisting of just a few notes. In my work, too, everything revolves around a single closed contour..”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van M.C. Escher, in het Nederlands): 'Nu wou ik je nog wat zeggen over het verband met muziek, en wel in hoofdzaak met die van Bach, d.w.z. de Fuga, of eenvoudiger canon.. .Het heeft heel veel van mijn motieven, die ik ook om verschillende assen laat draaien. Ik heb dat gevoel van relatie, verwantschap, tegenwoordig zoo sterk, dat ik tijdens het luisteren naar Bach, dikwijls geïnspireerd word en een sterke drang naar zijn dwingende ritme voel, een cadans die iets van de eindeloosheid zoekt. In de Fuga is alles gebaseerd op een enkel motief, dikwijls maar van enkele noten. Bij mij draait ook alles om een enkele gesloten contour..
Quote from Escher’s letter, 1940 to his friend Hein 's-Gravezande; as cited (and translated!) on the website of museum 'Escher in the Palace', The Hague: dutch original text https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-vandaag and english translation https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-today/?lang=en
1940's

Music , Feeling , Sense

“I have always been interested in oval or ovoid shapes. The first carvings were simple realistic oval forms of the human head or of a bird. Gradually my interest grew in more abstract values – the weight, poise and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form. The carving and piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension, changing in accordance with the contours of the original ovoid and with the degree of penetration of the material. Here is a sufficient field for exploration to last a lifetime..”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1932 - 1946, The Studio 132:643', (1946), p. 279

Bird , Change

“The Brahmans who were custodians of the idols and idol-houses, and “teachers of the infidels”, also received their share of attention from the soldiers of Allãh. Our citations contain only stray references to the Brahmans because they have been compiled primarily with reference to the destruction of temples. Even so, they provide the broad contours of another chapter in the history of medieval India, a chapter which has yet to be brought out in full. The Brahmans are referred to as magicians by some Islamic invaders and massacred straight away. Elsewhere, the Hindus who are not totally defeated and want to surrender on some terms, are made to sign a treaty saying that the Brahmans will be expelled from the temples. The holy cities of the Hindus were “the nests of the Brahmans” who had to be slaughtered before or after the destruction of temples, so that these places were “cleansed” completely of “kufr” and made fit as “abodes of Islam”. Amîr Khusrû describes with great glee how the heads of Brahmans “danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet”, along with those of the other “infidels” whom Malik Kãfûr had slaughtered during the sack of the temples at Chidambaram. Fîrûz Shãh Tughlaq got bags full of cow’s flesh tied round the necks of Brahmans and had them paraded through his army camp at Kangra. Muhmûd Shãh II Bahmanî bestowed on himself the honour of being a ghãzî, simply because he had killed in cold blood the helpless BrãhmaNa priests of the local temple after Hindu warriors had died fighting in defence of the fort at Kondapalli. The present-day progressives, leftists and dalits whose main plank is anti-Brahminism have no reason to feel innovative about their ideology. Anti-Brahminism in India is as old a the advent of Islam. Our present-day Brahmin-baiters are no more than ideological descendants of the Islamic invaders. Hindus will do well to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s deep reflection--“if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism must perish.””

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Feeling , History , Teachers , Dance

“This Spring of 1911 Marianne von Werefkin [his former study-mate in Russia and in fact his life-comapnion for many years, but never married] Andrei, Helene and I went to Prerow on the Baltic [coast]. For me that summer meant a great step forward in my art. I painted my finest landscapes there as well as large figure paintings in powerful, glowing colours and not at all naturalistic or objective. I used a great deal of red, blue, orange, cadmium yellow and chromium-oxide green. My forms were very strongly contoured in Prussian blue, and came with tremendous power from an inner ecstasy. 'Der Buckel', 'Violetter Turban', 'Selbstporträt'.... were created in this way. It was a turning-point in my art. It was in these years, up to 1914, just before the war [World War 1. ], that I painted my most powerful works, referred to as the pré-war works.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

Quote c. 1911; in 'Lebenserinnerungen', 1938; as cited in Alexej von Jawlensky, Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam; exhibition catalog 25/9 – 27/11-1994 (a. o. his life quotes from ['Life Memories'] he dictated late in his life, in 1938)
1900 - 1935

Life , War , World , Art

“It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

C'est l'imagination qui a enseigné à l'homme le sens moral de la couleur, du contour, du son et du parfum. Elle a créé, au commencement du monde, l'analogie et la métaphore. Elle décompose toute la création, et, avec les matériaux amassés et disposés suivant des règles dont on ne peut trouver l'origine que dans le plus profond de l'âme, elle crée un monde nouveau, elle produit la sensation du neuf. Comme elle a créé le monde (on peut bien dire cela, je crois, même dans un sens religieux), il est juste qu'elle le gouverne.
"Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française," III: La reine des facultés http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Salon_de_1859_%28Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiques%29#III._.E2.80.94_La_reine_des_facult.C3.A9s
Salon de 1859 (1859)

World , Color , Soul , Imagination

“Map age genes place of origin
and love's lineaments.For mapped onto each body is love.Carthography of one's own country
or the contours of a foreign land”

Ingrid de Kok (1951) South African writer

"Body maps," http://www.oulitnet.co.za/multimedia/vonkverse_ingrid2.asp from Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (2006), a contribution for the WikiAfrica Literature Project.

Love , Age , Country

“Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody—the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes—regardless of the size of the interval.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Music

“Believe in the holy contour of life”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

"Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" in a letter to Arabelle Porter (28 May 1955); published in Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956 (1995) and in a letter to Don Allen (1958); published in Heaven & Other Poems (1977)

Life

“If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Literature and Post-History" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

Dreams , Art , Intelligence , Laughter

“This is not an argument for levelling down but for raising up. The means for doing this are there. What matters is the will to do it. We all have a responsibility to ensure that the contours of the global economic map in the 21st century are not as steep and uneven as those of the 20th century.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 18, Making the World a Better Place, p. 600

“The realist, then, would seek in behalf of philosophy the same renunciation the same rigour of procedure, that has been achieved in science. This does not mean that he would reduce philosophy to natural or physical science. He recognizes that the philosopher has undertaken certain peculiar problems, and that he must apply himself to these, with whatever method he may find it necessary to employ. It remains the business of the philosopher to attempt a wide synoptic survey of the world, to raise underlying and ulterior questions, and in particular to examine the cognitive and moral processes. And it is quite true that for the present no technique at all comparable with that of the exact sciences is to be expected. But where such technique is attainable, as for example in symbolic logic, the realist welcomes it. And for the rest he limits himself to a more modest aspiration. He hopes that philosophers may come like scientists to speak a common language, to formulate common problems and to appeal to a common realm of fact for their resolution. Above all he desires to get rid of the philosophical monologue, and of the lyric and impressionistic mode of philosophizing. And in all this he is prompted not by the will to destroy but by the hope that philosophy is a kind of knowledge, and neither a song nor a prayer nor a dream. He proposes, therefore, to rely less on inspiration and more on observation and analysis. He conceives his function to be in the last analysis the same as that of the scientist. There is a world out yonder more or less shrouded in darkness, and it is important, if possible, to light it up. But instead of, like the scientist, focussing the mind's rays and throwing this or that portion of the world into brilliant relief, he attempts to bring to light the outlines and contour of the whole, realizing too well that in diffusing so widely what little light he has, he will provide only a very dim illumination.”

Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher

Chap XXV.
The Present Conflict of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical Background of the World War (1918)

World , Dreams , Hope , Question

“Each mountain ridge in this landscape has a distinct contour, with various peaks whose heights reflect evolutionary time. That is, within humankind's evolutionary landscape there are several naturally selected systems that contribute to channeling human experience toward religious paths. In the processing of human experience, these systems, and their components, interact and develop interrelated functions - as do geological, hydrological, and organic systems in the drainage process.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 11
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Mountain , Nature , Time

“From the point of view of technique, I liked there to be internal lines in objects, I mean that instead of circumscribing forms, they animate the insides of things—the inside of formless and non-delimited areas. They function as internal textures and not primarily as contours.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quote of Dubuffet in Catalogue, p. 47; as cited by Hubert Damisch, in 'Dubuffet or the Reading of the World', in 'Art de France 2' (1962), p. 337–346 (translated by Kent Minturn and Priya Wadhera)
1960-70's

Animals

“It is unquestionably the peacefulness and calm of the Spinozist system which particularly produces the idea of its depth, and which, with hidden but irresistible charm, has attracted so many minds. The Spinozist system will also always remain in a certain sense a model. A system of freedom — but with just as great contours, with the same simplicity, as a perfect counter-image (Gegenbild) of the Spinozist system — this would really be the highest system. This is why Spinozism, despite the many attacks on it, and the many supposed refutations, has never really become something truly past, never been really overcome up to now, and no one can hope to progress to the true and the complete in philosophy who has not at least once in his life lost himself in the abyss of Spinozism. Nobody who wishes to arrive at his own firm conviction should leave unread the main work of Spinoza, his Ethics (for he presented his system under this title), and I should like to urge everyone who is seriously concerned with his education not only to study assiduously on his own, which no teacher can replace, but to be most conscientious and careful in the choice of what he reads.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy (1833) [Translated from the German by Andrew Bowie]
S - Z

Peace , Study , Reading , Freedom

“If the streambed of education is being enlarged, one formidable force altering its contours is competition. Learning is where you find it: on "Sesame Street," in inner games of tennis and the Zen of everything, in teaching and learning cooperatives, in computers, on FM radio, in self-help books, in magazines... and television documentaries.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Game , Help , Learning , Self-confidence

“Nature shouldn’t be able to do this, Sunday thought. It shouldn’t be able to produce something that resembled the work of directed intelligence, something artful, when the only factors involved were unthinking physics and obscene, spendthrift quantities of time. Time to lay down the sediments, in deluge after deluge, entire epochs in the impossibly distant past when Mars had been both warm and wet, a world deluded into thinking it had a future. Time for cosmic happenstance to hurl a fist from the sky, punching down through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling the geological chapters like a bullet through a book. And then yesterday more time—countless millions of years—for wind and dust to work their callous handiwork, scouring and abrading, wearing the exposed layers back at subtly different rates depending on hardness and chemistry, util these deliberate-looking right-angled steps and contours began to assume grand and imperial solidity, rising from the depths like the stairways of the gods.
Awe-inspiring, yesterday. Sometimes it was entirely right and proper to be awed. And recognising the physics in these formations, the hand of time and matter and the nuclear forces underpinning all things, did not lessen that feeling. What was she, ultimately, but the end product of physics and matter? And what was her art but the product of physics and matter working on itself?”

Alastair Reynolds book Blue Remembered Earth

Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Chapter 17 (pp. 292-293)

Dependency , God , Books , World