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Totally mad. Utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense. (Douglas Adams)
People relate to things, objects... The important thing is to create something that relates to people. (Mark Adams)
I am not interested in the landscape in the topographical sense. I am only interested in painting one's feelings, strong feelings, passionate feelings. One paints in order to try to understand a bit about life and about oneself. (Norman Adams)
Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is one weapon against the world's bombardment... (James Agee)
Painters are people who use incomprehensible words to talk about their work. (Anonymous)
Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand. (Rudolf Arnheim)
Often the hands grasp more quickly than the head. (Hans Jean Arp)
What you don't understand, you can make mean anything. (Jay Asher)
Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly. (Richard Bach)
The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. (Sir Francis Bacon)
Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery. (Darby Bannard)
Every one of us sees 'green' differently. So everything is an approximation of understanding. (Nick Bantock)
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree. (Charles Baudelaire)
We all see the same thing differently. How we express that vision, that feeling, is so personal that few, if any, will be able to fully understand the 'true story' behind a given painting. (David C. Benjamin)
Understanding is not absolutely final. What's now right could be wrong later. (Toba Beta)
- interview of Beuys by Willoughby Sharp, 1969...
My art cannot be understood primarily by thinking. My art touches people who are in tune with my mode of thinking, but it is clear that people cannot understand my art by intellectual processes alone because no art can be experienced in that way. (Joseph Beuys)
Your mind is your servant, your body is your vehicle and your soul is your residence. (Yogi Bhajan)
When you understand who and what you are, your radiance projects into the universal radiance and everything around you becomes creative and full of opportunity. (Yogi Bhajan)
logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. (Ambrose Bierce)
In your heart may there be a sanctuary / For the stillness where clarity is born. (Dixie Black)
Whatever we well understand we express clearly, and words flow with ease. (Nicolas Boileau)
I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art. (Pierre Bonnard)
Reading is not just about learning to recognize and pronounce words, but also about how to hear and understand them... It is wise to remember that when we are reading letters never intended for us, any problems of understanding are ours and not theirs. (Marcus J. Borg)
Once you understand everything is metaphor, you live a quickened life. (Carole Ann Borges)
To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself. (Georges Braque)
Accept the fact that some people won't 'get' you... Take the time to understand their motivations and you won't take it so personally. If everyone likes you, then you probably don't stand for much. (Peter Bray)
People who understand everything get no stories. (Bertolt Brecht)
Painting several comparative images is a profitable way to begin to understand the concept of content. (Gerald Brommer)
It's easy to project confusion into your work unless you see the truth and wholly understand that which you are painting. (Harley Brown)
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. (Pearl S. Buck)
When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image. (Joseph Campbell)
It takes asking many questions from many perspectives and drawing conclusions from many experiences to truly understand something. (John Paul Caponigro)
You will learn to paint trees only by understanding them, their growth, their nature, their movement – and realizing that they are conscious living things. A tree seldom if ever encroaches upon the liberty of another tree. It never wastes its growth in unnecessary twistings. (John F. Carlson)
Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood. (Pablo Casals)
Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one's own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles. (Paul Cezanne)
I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose. (Charlie Chaplin)
The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion. (Pema Chodron)
People used to say my music was too difficult or too obscure, and I never set out to be difficult or obscure. I just set out to write what I felt as honestly as I could, and I am delighted when other people feel a part of themselves in the music. (Leonard Cohen)
Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The most painful thing for me is to be misunderstood. (Matthew Collings)
We see nothing truly until we understand it. (John Constable)
What I have sought is to understand what has been said. (Ananda Coomaraswamy)
I paint so as to better understand my world. I have learned that variations of color and patterns of light and shadow can be infinite. This is true even of the most mundane subject. (Michele Cooper)
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. (Marie Curie)
If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it. (Salvador Dali)
Understand who you are and who you want to be, and thereby learn how you may best relate to others. (Ken Danby)
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood. (Clarence Darrow)
The secret isn't that you're not being told.
The secret is that you're not able to hear. (Ram Dass)
It's hard to understand the world from your arm chair. (Jeff Davidson)
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. (Robert Cecil Day-Lewis)
-on analyzing his music...
When you take the wings off a butterfly, it's no longer a butterfly. (Claude Debussy)
Paintings must be looked at and looked at and looked at... No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them. (Charles Demuth)
Confound those who have said our remarks before us. (Aelius Donatus)
It is hard for a flat thing to understand a round one. (Arthur Dove)
Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous. (Peter Drucker)
The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure – if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out. (John Drummond)
If by the people you understand the multitude, the hoi polloi, 'tis no matter what they think; they are sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong; their judgement is a mere lottery. (John Dryden)
There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when the sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime. (Alexandre Dumas)
Most people are not trained to want to face the process of re-understanding a subject they already know. One must obtain not just literacy, but deep involvement and re-understanding. (Charles Eames)
Those who understand only what can be explained understand very little. (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)
Please explain the problem to me slowly, as I do not understand things quickly. (Albert Einstein)
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms. (George Eliot)
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events. (T. S. Eliot)
The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area. (T. S. Eliot)
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life. (Ralph Ellison)
It is a luxury to be understood. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
There is a difference between art and life and that difference is readability. (Marian Engel)
I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work. (Brian Eno)
What does it take to let go of our egos, to float comfortably in the nothingness? Would this not be the only way to understand and attain clarity of our guiding spirit? (Ian Factor)
I don't believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art... If you are moved by it, you don't need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it. (Federico Fellini)
I have yet to fully understand why I am an artist, something I hope to resolve by the end of my life. (John Ferrie)
There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics. (Richard Feynman)
What I cannot create, I do not understand. (Richard Feynman)
The growth of understanding follows an ascending spiral rather than a straight line. (Joanna Field)
There are three things I have always loved but never understood; art, music, and women. (Bernard de Fontenelle)
Art should be understood as a cognitive function with its own neural networks. (Luis Fornazzari)
With a curious zeal to better understand our own existence, we often go far out of our way to find out who we are and where we have come from. Why? We need to know, not just for the present, but from our earliest beginnings to the present. (Edward J. Fraughton)
The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress. (Sigmund Freud)
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. (Edwin H. Friedman)
One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs. (Buckminster Fuller)
Does an artist truly need to understand her times in order to create? I'm not sure. We're all sitting in a context. It's a market. (Sara Genn)
Taurus cacas exit cerebella - B.S. baffles brains. (Kjerkius Gennius, 36BC)
Understanding art is not a purely cognitive enterprise. Aesthetic meaning or truth is what one experiences in terms of valuable insights by responding to the internal structure of the work of art. Indeed, such insights play an important role in our understanding of life and emotions. (Ranjan K. Ghosh)
I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand. (Alberto Giacometti)
The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced. (Andre Gide)
If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else. (Nikki Giovanni)
We artists can only go so far as the people can follow us. We are not alone, we are part of the system. We can take risks, but if you want to go to the peak of your consciousness, you may very well find yourself alone. Even if you know how to translate what you see, maybe only ten people will be able to understand what you tell. But, if you have faith in your vision, and retell it again and again, you will start noticing that, after a time, more people will begin to catch up with you. (Jean Giraud)
-Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years. (Malcolm Gladwell)
A man doesn't learn to understand anything unless he loves it. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
- unsourced...
Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more. (Vincent van Gogh)
Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis. (Vincent van Gogh)
If we are ready to tolerate everything as understood, there is nothing left to explain; while if we sourly refuse to take anything, even tentatively, as clear, no explanation can be given. (Nelson Goodman)
-Dream Days, 1898...
There's a misunderstanding somewhere, and I want to put it right... (Kenneth Grahame)
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand. (Gunther Grass)
Experiences, much more than instruction, are a seeing with the inner eye – finding a channel to our essential inner life, a door to our deepest understanding wherein we have the capacity for universal response. (Lawren Harris)
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special. (Stephen Hawking)
Much learning does not teach understanding. (Heraclitus)
Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. (A. E. Housman)
My goal is to make all my paintings clear and realistic, even more understandable than a photograph. (E. J. Hughes)
I do not want my pictures to be read instantly like an advertising billboard; rather I want to hold the viewer's attention for as long as possible. (Christopher Insoll)
Understanding is more comprehensive than intellect because it intuits truths that cautious intellect can get sight of but never embrace - like a sea-gazer who never plunges in. When we understand, we have left intellect on the shore and don't need it and its crabbed analyses. (David S. Jones)
We camouflage our true being before others to protect ourselves against criticism or rejection. This protection comes at a steep price... we are misunderstood. When we are misunderstood, especially by family and friends, we join the 'lonely crowd.' Worse... we tend to lose touch with our real selves. (Sidney Jourard)
Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood. (Carl Gustav Jung)
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth. (Carl Gustav Jung)
When we are able to read a painting only through our eyes without opening our mouth, we become familiar with the language of this Art and can try to understand a painter and his work. (Jyotsna Kadam)
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. (Franz Kafka)
I don't let go of concepts - I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me. (Byron Katie)
Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind. (Rockwell Kent)
Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it. (Charles F. Kettering)
Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. (Barbara Kingsolver)
There aren't twelve-hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don't care. (Rudyard Kipling)
I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear. (Karl Kraus)
Can I reject everything my brain experienced? Is intellectual understanding any understanding at all? (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely - the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears - when you give your whole attention to it. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself. (Milan Kundera)
That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along. (Madeleine L'Engle)
Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquillity and happiness we all seek. (Dalai Lama)
This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting. (Fernand Leger)
... that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. (Doris Lessing)
Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another. (Claude Levi-Strauss)
If you want truly to understand something, try to change it. (Kurt Lewin)
We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves. (Walter Lippmann)
When I look back on everything I've done, it all somehow makes sense to me. But it doesn't make sense when you're actually doing it. (Robert Longo)
Folks never understand the folks they hate. (James Russell Lowell)
Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life. (Yo-Yo Ma)
A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding. (General Douglas MacArthur)
From birth... understanding the world demands that we transform the rich chaotic soup we see into separate objects... This process is essential and necessary to just about everybody except artists. (Arthur Maderson)
Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature. (Maurice Maeterlinck)
We possess only the happiness we are able to understand. (Maurice Maeterlinck)
I hear, I forget... I see, I remember... I do, I understand. (Mantra)
-Life of Pi...
The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? (Yann Martel)
What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting. (Henri Matisse)
My paintings are so legible, I feel guilty. (Doris McCarthy)
Now I understand / What you tried to say to me / And how you suffered for your sanity / And how you tried to set them free / They would not listen, they did not know how / Perhaps they'll listen now. (Don McLean)
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness. (Marshall McLuhan)
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. (H. L. Mencken)
To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance - and the body is our anchorage in the world. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood. (Henry Miller)
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way. (Marvin Minsky)
...the photograph, now they are detached from their original surroundings, they are involved in a close world in which they only relate to each other: all the rest of 'reality' has vanished. This allows us to see those elements from a new point of view and perhaps to reach a better understanding... (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy)
That must be wonderful: I don't understand it at all. (Moliere)
One can do something if one can see and understand it... (Claude Monet)
To paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its ways in that particular spot. (Claude Monet)
There's no one there to understand, there's just understanding, which flourishes in you as peace, joy and contentment. (Mooji)
Real painters understand with a brush in their hand. (Berthe Morisot)
Engaging in daily conversations with nature provide an understanding unobtainable through any other method. (Charles Muench)
Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation. (Edward R. Murrow)
My architecture is easy to understand. And enjoy. I hope it also is hard to forget. (Oscar Niemeyer)
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
-on New Mexico...
Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
We can also use neuroarthistory much more widely, both to better understand the nature of familiar artistic phenomena such as style, and to crack so far intractable problems such as 'What is the origin of art?' (John Onians)
We have to shift our understanding of ourselves as separate individuals, each seeking our own welfare, to an understanding of how we fit into social, biological, and physical environments. (Robert Ornstein)
An anthill increases by accumulation. Medicine is consumed by distribution. That which is feared lessens by association. This is the thing to understand. (Ovid)
My job requires me to understand what it is that moves me in order to focus on painting those subjects to which I have a strong emotional response. (Kate Palmer)
Understanding can overcome any situation, however mysterious or insurmountable it may appear to be. (Norman Vincent Peale)
If at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted. (Perelman)
Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling, and clear in wanting. (Fernando Pessoa)
In order to understand, I destroyed myself. (Fernando Pessoa)
What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead. (Pablo Picasso)
Everyone wants to understand painting. Why not try to understand the songs of the birds? (Pablo Picasso)
I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that have come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. (Pablo Picasso)
The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? (Pablo Picasso)
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. (Robert M. Pirsig)
I do not understand the language or code of the birds but I do still love their songs. New visions need not be fully understood – only agreeable. (Todd Plough)
Art is a means of expression that must be understood by everybody, everywhere. It grows out of the earth, the texture of our lives and our experiences. (Douglas Portway)
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. (Ezra Pound)
'Live in the question' is what allows us to stay open to understandings which only become apparent with the passing of time. (Peter Prest)
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. (proverb)
Why do people go to the artist and want to know why he did something? They can't understand the work. Sometimes they get an answer, sometimes they don't... they want something they don't otherwise get from the work. (Noah Purifoy)
We have to get inside the thing, pay attention to its shape, its edges, its effect on the surrounding shapes. By becoming our subjects we gain a better understanding, and the ability to create better art. (June Raabe)
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see. (Ayn Rand)
I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended. (Robert Rauschenberg)
It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them. (Odilon Redon)
A fat lot of good it would do if I told you that Titian's courtesans make you want to caress them. Some day you'll see the Titians for yourself, and if they have no effect on you, then you don't understand the first thing about painting. And I wouldn't be able to help you. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
How is it that in the so-called barbarian ages art was understood, whereas in our age of progress exactly the opposite is true? (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
-conversation with Nicholas Serota, Spring 2011...
I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy. (Gerhard Richter)
It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean. (Tony Robbins)
I've learned... that sometimes all a person needs is a hand to hold and a heart to understand. (Andy Rooney)
I always thought that I was me - but no, I was you and never knew it. (Rumi)
I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world. (Salman Rushdie)
Sitting still and flushing out the details of a certain setting in nature with either a pencil or brush is the beginning of a small understanding of the workings of God. (Lynne Ryall)
You have to know the past to understand the present. (Carl Sagan)
There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them. (Carl Sandburg)
We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death. (May Sarton)
The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense... (Friedrich Von Schlegel)
Can that which has cost the artist days, weeks, months and even years of reflection be understood in a flash by a dilettante? (Robert Schumann)
You are meant to understand the nature of your inner self, and to manifest it outward. (Seth)
I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and if I don't succeed I consider it's my own fault. (Dmitri Shostakovich)
In order to be deep, we sometimes have to cut through and cut apart. That is to be seen in the common phrase, 'Cut it out!' The reason is that this thing is seen as superfluous and therefore it should be excised, as a growth, unnecessary, should be excised. (Eli Siegel)
-Every Thing on It...
Underneath my outside face / There's a face that none can see. / A little less smiley, / A little less sure, / But a whole lot more like me. (Shel Silverstein)
You may be a puzzle, but I like the way the parts fit. (Frank Sinatra)
It takes years of work and great effort to understand and be fluent in a medium and this holds true for both the creator and the observer. (Judy Singer)
Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry. (Samuel Smiles)
Art is the most universal language and it should speak so that the man in the street can understand. (George Southwell)
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. (Baruch Spinoza)
No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides. (Baruch Spinoza)
To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent. (Madame de Stael)
The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing. (Gertrude Stein)
The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality. (Rudolf Steiner)
What the heart knows today the head will understand tomorrow. (James Stephens, author)
We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold. (Wallace Stevens)
My music is best understood by children and animals. (Igor Stravinsky)
When you understand a frog through and through, you attain enlightenment. (Shunryu Suzuki)
You have to understand how the human eye behaves when it views a scene for the first time. Work with that knowledge, and your paintings will have more drama and will evoke strong reactions. (Mike Svob)
Art is a means of expression that must be understood by everybody, everywhere. It grows out of the earth, the textures of our lives, and our experience. (Rufino Tamayo)
I paint to understand my world and my place in it. I paint to pray, to curse, to sort, to number, to structure, to destructure, to bleed, to preserve, to recognize, to see, to hide, to show, to tell, to think, to stop thinking, to detest, to love, to act, to be still, to laugh, to cry, to detest, but mostly to love for now I am human, but in a few short years I will be something else. (Janice Tanton)
It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are. (Saint Teresa of Avila)
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it. (Leo Tolstoy)
Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid. (Leo Tolstoy)
I don't paint so that people will understand me, I paint to show what a particular scene looks like. (J. M. W. Turner)
Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding. (Tristan Tzara)
It is only when the formed learns from the unformed that there is understanding. (Chuang Tzu)
No matter how much time you spend studying something, painting it gives you a totally different understanding of it. (Carol Ubben)
The fact that no one understands you doesn't make you an artist. (Author unknown)
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Author unknown)
Confusion is the step before clarity. (Author unknown)
To paint, to love, to dream, to make money, to eat healthily, to dance, to sing, to think, to say: everything, nothing, to understand. (Vartini)
Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts. (Marquis de Vauvenargues)
One truly understands only what one can create. (Giambattista Vico)
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure what you do not understand. (Leonardo da Vinci)
The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it. (Voltaire)
If there is something in your painting that needs explaining to the viewer, then it should never have been included. Just because it is there in the subject is never sufficient reason to paint it there. (Robert Wade)
At the moment when you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don't understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time. (Jane Wagner)
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. (Alice Walker)
When you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that's much more interesting in the long run. (Andy Warhol)
-The Path to New Music...
If you want to make something clear to someone, you mustn't forget the main point, the most important thing, and if you bring in something else as an illustration you mustn't wander off into endless irrelevancies. (Anton Webern)
I write to understand as much as to be understood. (Elie Wiesel)
The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you. (Oscar Wilde)
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying. (Oscar Wilde)
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. (Virginia Woolf)
My wretched dragon is perplexed. (William Butler Yeats)
Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand. (Xun Zi)
In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth. (Xun Zi)
If a person needs pages of text to explain his or her work, that person should be a writer, not a visual artist. (Gertjan Zwiggelaar)
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