Quotes about illustration

A collection of quotes on the topic of illustration, use, time, timing.

Quotes about illustration

Paul Watson photo

“It's dangerous & humiliating. The whalers killed whales while green peace watched. Now, you don't walk by a child that is being abused, you don't walk by a kitten that is being kicked to death and do nothing. So I find it abhorrent to sit there and watch a whale being slaughtered and do nothing but "bear witness" as they call it. I think it was best illustrated a few years ago, the contradictions that we have, when a ranger in Zimbabwe shot and killed a poacher that was about to kill a black rhinoceros and uh human rights groups around the world said "how dare you? Take a human life to protect an animal". I think the rangers' answer to that really illustrated a hypocrisy. He said "Ya know, if I lived in, If I was a police officer in Herrari and a man ran out of Bark Place Bank with a bag of money and I shot him in the head in front of everybody and killed him, you'd pin a medal on me and call me a national hero. Why is that bag of paper more valued than the future heritage of this nation?" This is our values. WE fight, WE kill, WE risk our lives for things we believe in… Imagine going into Mecca, walk up to the black stone and spit on it. See how far you get. You’re not going to get very far. You’re going to be torn to pieces. Walk into Jerusalem, walk up to that wailing wall with a pick axe, start whacking away. See how far you’re going to get, somebody is going to put a bullet in your back. And everybody will say you deserved it. Walk into the Vatican with a hammer, start smashing a few statues. See how far you’re going to get. Not very far. But each and every day, ya know, people go into the most beautiful, most profoundly sacred cathedrals of this planet, the rainforests of the Amazonia, the redwood forests of California, the rainforests of Indonesia, and totally desecrate & destroy these cathedrals with bulldozers, chainsaws and how do we respond to that? Oh, we write a few letters and protest; we dress up in animal costumes with picket signs and jump up and down; but if the rainforests of Amazonia and redwoods of California, were as, or had as much value to us as a chunk of old meteorite in Mecca, a decrepit old wall in Jerusalem or a piece of old marble in the Vatican, we would literally rip those pieces limb from limb for the act of blasphemy that we’re committing but we won’t do that because nature is an abstraction, wilderness is an abstraction. It has no value in our anthropocentric world where the only thing we value is that which is created by humans.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist
Nikola Tesla photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
John Kricfalusi photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Bertrand Russell photo
Paul Sérusier photo
Emanuel Lasker photo
Frantz Fanon photo
Abraham Lincoln photo
Pope Francis photo
J. J. Thomson photo
Jackson Pollock photo

“I hate looking at photography books or illustrated magazines. This is not because of contempt. I’d rather look at contact sheets: that is where you can sense the individual.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Only Geometricians May Enter: Interview with Yves Bourde (1974), p. 62

Ramana Maharshi photo
George Ritzer photo
John Tyndall photo

“The experimental researches of Faraday are so voluminous, their descriptions are so detailed, and their wealth of illustration is so great, as to render it a heavy labour to master them.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

Preface to the Second Edition (December 1869).
Faraday as a Discoverer (1868)
Context: The experimental researches of Faraday are so voluminous, their descriptions are so detailed, and their wealth of illustration is so great, as to render it a heavy labour to master them. The multiplication of proofs, necessary and interesting when the new truths had to be established, are however less needful now when these truths have become household words in science.

Taylor Caldwell photo

“Learning … should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life's greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the minds of noble and learned men, not a conducted tour through a jail.”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

The Sound of Thunder (1957) Pt. I, Ch. 9
1950s
Context: Learning … should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life's greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the minds of noble and learned men, not a conducted tour through a jail. So its surroundings should be as gracious as possible, to complement it.

Abraham Lincoln photo
Daniel Defoe photo
Brian K. Vaughan photo

“There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Source: Saga, Vol. 3

Thomas Hardy photo
Werner Heisenberg photo

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.”

Die Quantentheorie ist so ein wunderbares Beispiel dafür, daß man einen Sachverhalt in völliger Klarheit verstanden haben kann und gleichzeitig doch weiß, daß man nur in Bildern und Gleichnissen von ihm reden kann.
Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (1969); also in "Kein Chaos, aus dem nicht wieder Ordnung würde", Die Zeit No. 34 (22 August 1969) http://www.zeit.de/1969/34/kein-chaos-aus-dem-nicht-wieder-ordnung-wuerde/komplettansicht; as translated in Physics and Beyond : Encounters and Conversation (1971)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo
Confucius photo

“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.”

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

The Analects, The Great Learning
Context: The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.
From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.

Marsha Norman photo

“Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.”

Marsha Norman (1947) American playwright, screenwriter and novelist

Source: The Fortune Teller

Hans Christian Andersen photo

“My life will be the best illustration of all my work.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

Source: The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography

Elizabeth Gilbert photo
George Biddell Airy photo
Benjamin Franklin photo

“Franklin is a good type of our American manhood. Although not the wealthiest or the most powerful, he is undoubtedly, in the versatility of his genius and achievements, the greatest of our self-made men. The simple yet graphic story in the Autobiography of his steady rise from humble boyhood in a tallow-chandler shop, by industry, economy, and perseverance in self-improvement, to eminence, is the most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men. It is in itself a wonderful illustration of the results possible to be attained in a land of unequaled opportunity by following Franklin's maxims.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Written by Frank Woodworth Pine in his introduction to the 1916 publication of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm. Pine, F.W. (editor). Henry Holt and Company via Gutenberg Press. (1916). Introduction.
The Autobiography (1818), The Autobiography (1916)

Ryszard Kapuściński photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Umberto Boccioni photo
Alfred Binet photo

“My thinking at that time was determined by a kind of wilfully repressed pleasure[Freude] in Freud, and I wanted to be as artistically direct as plumber illustrating the history of art with a spanner.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 12 (Introductory text to the portfolio Transfusion,1990.)

Vincent Van Gogh photo

“.. by going on drawing those types of working people, etc., I hope to arrive at the point of being able to do illustration work for papers and books.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

In his letter to brother Theo, from Brussels, Belgium (January 1881, letter 140); as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, p. 19
being art student in Brussels
1880s, 1881

Walter Bagehot photo
Erik Naggum photo

“A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact."”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Emacs inferior to XEmacs? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.programmer/msg/716a6bf5d03226a1 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Robert Rauschenberg photo
James Gleick photo

“In the thousands of articles that made up the technical literature of chaos, few were cited more often than "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." For years, no single object would inspire more illustrations, even motion pictures, than the mysterious curve depicted at the end, the double spiral that became known as the Lorenz attractor.”

Source: Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987, p. 52; as cited in: Joshua Keating, in " Can Chaos theory teach us anything about Foreign Policy http://ideas.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/23/can_chaos_theory_teach_us_anything_about_international_relations", at ideas.foreignpolicy.com, May 23rd 2013.

Lorin Morgan-Richards photo

“Primarily, they (ideas) come from daydreaming or every day occurrences. I try to get out and about, especially new places to let the environment inspire me. I start an illustration of a building I see and then the elements of different characters will populate in my mind like a set and actors on a stage. If nothing comes up I continue to draw until something unfolds.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Regarding how he comes up with ideas for his comic strips The Goodbye Family and The Noodle Rut (1 June 2017).
Source: Lorin Morgan-Richards Newsletter #2, Us6.campaign-archive2.com, 2017-06-26 http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=51e751ef352e602deca0ecdc7&id=2e82f26313,

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo
Maurice Wilkes photo
Jacques Bertin photo
John Ralston Saul photo

“In the evening I study a fair.... if you could see the pomp and luxury of the merry-go-round and the stands and booths. Everything is decorated in Baroque-style, all gold and silver; there are mirrors, fabrics, and electric lightning. By night the whole thing is fantastic and rowdy. First of all I shall make a small picture and some drawings for illustrations.”

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Italian artist

quote c. 1900, in: Giacomo Balla (1871 – 1951), ed. Fagiolo dell'Arco, exh. catalogue, Galleria Nationale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, 1971
Balla studied a fair for his later painting ' Luna park in Paris https://www.wikiart.org/en/giacomo-balla/luna-park-par-s-1900,' he painted in 1900

Alfred Marshall photo
Robert T. Bakker photo
Saul D. Alinsky photo

“Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957].”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Quote of Twombly in 'Writings', Flash Art International, Laura Cherubini, October 2008 (translation from Italian: Beatrice Barbareschi)
1950 - 1960

John Howe (illustrator) photo

“Illustrating Tolkien means treading warily, dipping one's brush in shadow and rinsing them in light. Battle and balance, down the impossible path between the clear and the obscure.”

John Howe (illustrator) (1957) Canadian illustrator

As quoted in Tolkien's World: Paintings of Middle-Earth (1992) published by MJF Books

Anand Gandhi photo
Guity Novin photo
Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau photo
Jorge Luis Borges photo

“The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Shakespeare's Memory, (1983); as translated by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions (1998)

Silas Weir Mitchell photo

“I must have told my story ill if to every physician who hears me its illustrations have not the invigorating force of moral tonics.”

Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) American physician

Transaction of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1887, 9: 337, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Émile Durkheim photo

“That is a complete waste of your time and the government's money. You are a native speaker of English; in ten minutes you can produce more illustrations of any point in English grammar than you will find in many millions of words of random text.”

Lees's response when informed that Nelson Francis had received a grant to produce the Brown Corpus.
Biber, D., and E. Finegan. 1991. "On the exploitation of computerized corpora in variation studies." In K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.), English corpus linguistics: Studies in honour of Jan Svartvik, 204-220. London: Longman.

Duncan Gregory photo
Roger Ebert photo

“I could list some Japanese films illustrating this, but the last thing the audience for Memoirs of a Geisha wants to see is a more truthful film with less gorgeous women and shabbier production values.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/memoirs-of-a-geisha-2005 of Memoirs of a Geisha (9 December 2005)
Reviews, Two-and-a-half star reviews

Aron Ra photo

“I mean it; the Bible-god of western monotheism is just like that horrible kid. Who would want to be trapped in a house with an indomitable telepathic despot and have to guard your thoughts –or be voluntarily mindless- and endure that existence forever and ever? Religion doesn’t want to talk about life either. They hate practically everything that goes on in life. They want to talk about death and pretend that THAT is life. And those of us who know life, live life, and love life, they accuse of being dead already. Every aspect of their world-view is upside-down or backwards -as DogmaDebate brilliantly illustrated. What these religionists preach actually diminishes the very meaning of life. Humans tend to value most that which is rare and fleeting. Such is life. The more you have of anything, the less valuable it is. They’re claiming immortality for eternity, rendering the value of life infinitely worthless. They sell their imaginary after-life as if it is sooo much better than this period of discomfort we have to endure before we achieve paradise. Having to toil in this fallen, sin-corrupted, dead-and-damned world. They hate existence itself so much that they actually long for the end-of-days, and only seem to get happy when they think Armageddon is upon us.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Fukkenuckabee http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/21/fukkenuckabee/ (December 21, 2012)

Sinclair Lewis photo
Helen Suzman photo

“Mugabe has destroyed that country while South Africa has stood by and done nothing. The way Mugabe was feted at the inauguration last month was an embarrassing disgrace. But it served well to illustrate very clearly Mbeki's point of view.”

Helen Suzman (1917–2009) South African politician

As quoted in "Democracy? It was better under apartheid, says Helen Suzman" https://web.archive.org/web/20120901223952/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1462042/Democracy-It-was-better-under-apartheid-says-Helen-Suzman.html (15 May 2004), by Jane Flanagan, The Telegraph
2000s

Gerhard Richter photo
Henry Hazlitt photo

“Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.”

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Broken Window (ch. 2)

Asger Jorn photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“I am not interested in illustrating my time. A man’s 'time' limits him; it does not truly liberate him. Our age – it is of science – of mechanism – of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Clyfford Still in an interview with Ti Grace Sharpless, 1963; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 201
1960s

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 61

Gregory Scott Paul photo

“The dinosaur world I grew up in was classical. They were universally seen as scaley herps that inhabited the immobile continents. There was no hint that birds were their direct descendents. Being reptiles, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and rather sluggish except perhaps for the smaller more bird-like examples. They all dragged their tails. Forelimbs were often sprawling. Leg muscles were slender in the reptilian manner. Intellectual capacity was minimal, as were social activity and parenting; the Knight painting of a Triceratops pair watching over a baby threatened by the Tyrant King was a notable exception. Hadrosaurs and especially sauropods were dinosaurian hippos, the latter perhaps too titanic to even emerge on land, and if they did so were limited by their bulk to lifting one foot of the ground at a time. Suitable only for the lush, warm and sunny tropical climate that enveloped the world from pole to pole before the Cenozoic, a cooling climate and new mountain chains did the obsolete archosaurs in, leaving only the crocodilians. Dinosaurs and the bat-winged pterosaurs were merely an evolutionary interlude, a period of geo-biological stasis before things got really interesting with the rise of the energetic and quick witted birds and especially mammals, leading with inexorable progress to the apex of natural selection: Man. It was pretty much all wrong. Deep down I sensed something was not quite right. Illustrating dinosaurs I found them to be much more reminiscent of birds and mammals than of the reptiles they were supposed to be. I was primed for a new view.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Autobiography, part I http://gspauldino.com/part1.html, gspauldino.com

Norman Angell photo

“I find it very significant that no religious traditions, Islam included, is ever in a position, I think almost by definition, to put cruelty first in the order of its priorities of the terrible things that human beings can do. That is perfectly illustrated in the story of Abraham's sacrifice with his son. Because, of course, what the story's all about is faith, the importance, and the primacy of faith. … What is the essence of faith in the story is Abraham's willingness (a) not to question God about his command to sacrifice his son, and (b) to proceed slowly, deliberately, over a period of time -- three days, I think it was -- [and] march up the mountain, prepare the sacrifice, unquestioning, resolute. [It was] the perfect, as Kierkegaard put it, "night of faith" model, exemplar of faith. And [Abraham] is, in the Muslim tradition exactly that -- an exemplar of faith. That is the importance of Abraham to Muslims. … Had he faltered, his faith would have been less, a degree or so less. He didn't falter. God immediately stops it at the absolute last moment and, of course, the act is ended. But what the story is all about is how faith in God comes first, before anything else, and then follow various virtues, of which harm to other human beings surely has to be below faith. It seemed to me that that is something that the hijackers certainly took to heart.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Khushwant Singh photo
M. C. Escher photo
Emma Goldman photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Dinesh D'Souza photo
John Tenniel photo

“It is a curious fact that with Through the Looking-Glass the faculty of making book illustrations departed from me. … I have done nothing in that direction since.”

John Tenniel (1820–1914) British illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist

Declining to illustrate a later book by Lewis Carroll, as quoted in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), p. 146

Peter Blake photo

“Album covers are like any other vehicle, they are a means of illustrating a story.”

Peter Blake (1932) British artist

Ian Herbert North, "We hope you will enjoy the show", http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20050211/ai_n9504263 The Independent, 2005-02-11
Sgt. Pepper's cover

Mike Tyson photo
William Bateson photo