Quotes & Sayings About Escher

Only those who attempt the absurd ... will achieve the impossible. I think ... I think it's in my basement ... Let me go upstairs and check. — M.C. Escher

Although I am even now still a layman in the area of mathematics, and although I lack theoretical knowledge, the mathematicians, and in particular the crystallographers, have had considerable influence on my work of the last twenty years. The laws of the phenomena around us
order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals
have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems. — M.C. Escher

I could fill an entire second life with working on my prints. — M.C. Escher

It folded back on itself like something that M. C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which it is no part of this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with all the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up. — Douglas Adams

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists. — M.C. Escher

I might be in the basement. I'll go upstairs and check. — M.C. Escher

I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days. — M.C. Escher

I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity. — M.C. Escher

To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am. — M.C. Escher

Order is repetition of units.
Chaos is multiplicity without rhythm. — M.C. Escher

And speaking of Escher, it's worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right, literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call 'reality' there was always an Escheresque, a Boschian, a Munchian fact - a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered once the civilizational rock was finally overturned. — Adrian Barnes

The regular division of the plane into congruent figures evoking an association in the observer with a familiar natural object is one of these hobbies or problems ... I have embarked on this geometric problem again and again over the years, trying to throw light on different aspects each time. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if this problem had never occurred to me; one might say that I am head over heels in love with it, and I still don't know why. — M.C. Escher

There is something breathtaking about the basic laws of crystals. They are in no sense a discovery of the human mind; they just "are" - they exist quite independently of us. The most that man can do is become aware, in a moment of clarity, that they are there, and take cognizance of them. — M.C. Escher

For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art. — M.C. Escher

Scientists are fascinated by Escher's work because they recognize in it not only a concept of the world with which they are familiar but also a similar attitude toward that world. For them as for him, the plurality of the world signifies neither absurdity nor chaos but a challenge to look for new logical relationships between phenomena. — J. L. Locher

In mathematical quarters, the regular division of the plane has been considered theoretically ... [Mathematicians] have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. By their very nature they are more interested in the way in which the gate is opened than in the garden lying behind it. — M.C. Escher

Hands, are the most honest part of the human body, they cannot lie as laughing eyes and the mouth can. — M.C. Escher

Science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the boderline between the two respective domains. — M.C. Escher

Storytelling isn't an Escher staircase. — Dave Morris

He turned them into real-life versions of an M. C. Escher drawing, automating them to the rafters, with blinking lights on aisles and shelves to guide human workers to the right products, and conveyor belts that ran into and out of massive machines, called Crisplants, that took products from the conveyors and scanned and sorted them into customer orders to be packaged and shipped. These facilities, Wright decreed, would be called not warehouses but distribution centers, as they were in Walmart's internal lexicon. — Brad Stone

No matter how cleverly we disguise our anxieties they bear witness to the imperfect nature of the human heart. To be is to become. To become is not to be. We are a work-in-progress, incomplete, imperfect, unrealised, and by virtue of temporal actions, temporary - a verb more than a noun, an inner quest and an outward odyssey framed by metaphors, like Escher's "Print Gallery"; we make the endless journey round the pictures, retracing our steps in forgetfulness, avoiding but mindful of the space where there are no pictures, where there is no gallery, where there is nothing at all. And like flies in a fly bottle, trapped by a failure of vision, we go round and round and round the moebius loop of a print gallery of our own making, a picture inside a picture inside a picture, forever. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness. — M.C. Escher

Originality is merely an illusion. — M.C. Escher

Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher. — Andre Aciman

Simplicity and order are, if not the principal, then certainly the most important guidelines for human beings in general. — M.C. Escher

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling? — M.C. Escher

A woman once rang me up and said, 'Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print -Reptiles- you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.' I replied, 'Madam, if that's the way you see it, so be it.' — M.C. Escher

It has always irked me as improper that there are still so many people for whom the sky is no more than a mass of random points of light. I do not see why we should recognize a house, a tree, or a flower here below and not, for example, the red Arcturus up there in the heavens as it hangs from its constellation Bootes, like a basket hanging from a balloon. — M.C. Escher

I came to the ... open gate of mathematics. From here, well-trodden paths lead in every direction, and since then I have often spent time there. Sometimes I think ... I have trodden all the paths ... and then I suddenly discover a new path and experience fresh delights. — M.C. Escher

So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen. — M.C. Escher

I look at people like Picasso and Da Vinci and Escher and Miles Davis, and they'll write or paint that one definitive masterpiece of maybe 50 that they have that's really trying to go outside the box, trying to do something that's tough. And then when you accomplish it, you look back and go, 'Yeeaaaah - masterpiece.' — Lupe Fiasco

The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure. — M.C. Escher

What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body? — Rudy Rucker

Drawing is deception. — M.C. Escher

As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses. — M.C. Escher

My work is a game, a very serious game. — M.C. Escher

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder. — M.C. Escher

I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well. — M.C. Escher

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough. — M.C. Escher

For the burglar, every building is infinite, endlessly weaving back into itself through meshed gears made of fire escapes and secondary stairways, window frames and screened-in porches, pet doors and ventilation shafts, everything interpenetrating, everything mixed together in a fantastic knot. Rooms and halls coil together like dragons inside of dragons or snakes eating their own tails, rooms opening onto every other room in the city. For the burglar, doors are everywhere. Where we see locks and alarms, they see M. C. Escher. — Geoff Manaugh

I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity. — M.C. Escher

At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important. — M.C. Escher

I want to be the guy who the guy you admire admires. I hope his name is Guy, because I admire M.C. Escher. — Jarod Kintz

If I had to pick one artist to tile my bathroom I would go with MC Escher. — Demetri Martin

We adore chaos because we love to produce order. — M.C. Escher

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew! — M.C. Escher

I am a graphic artist heart and soul, though I find the term artist rather embarrassing. — M.C. Escher

I've learned so much from my ups and downs as a life long vegan. I'm really excited to share my experiences and insights so that you can get the most out of your vegan diet. — Ursula Escher

All my works are games, serious game. — M.C. Escher

Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever. — David Mitchell

[ ... ] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Wonder is the salt of the earth. — M.C. Escher

I am always wandering around in enigmas. There are young people who constantly come to tell me: you, too, are making Op Art. I haven't the slightest idea what that is, Op Art. I've been doing this work for thirty years now. — M.C. Escher

There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account. Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth's crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his stone tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed. — M.C. Escher

Trying to navigate the halls of Hogwarts was like ... probably not quite as bad as wandering around inside an Escher painting, that was the sort of thing you said for rhetorical effect rather than for its being true.
A short time later, Harry was thinking that in fact an Escher painting would have both pluses and minuses compared to Hogwarts. Minuses: No consistent gravitational orientation. Pluses: At least the stairs wouldn't move around WHILE YOU WERE STILL ON THEM. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say. — M.C. Escher

I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me. — M.C. Escher

When he did think - when his brain began the slow chugging of rusty gears - the only thoughts that came were unspeakable things like, what's the worst age a child can die? Worse yet was - after hours spent staring at the ceiling until it became a real-life Escher print with fans on the floor, useless windowsills, and dresser drawers that spilled underwear when opened - worse yet was when his mind found answers to those questions. Two-years-old isn't so bad, he mused. They barely had a life. Twenty? At least they got to experience life! But fourteen ... fourteen was the worst. — Jake Vander Ark

I never got a pass mark in math ... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books. — M.C. Escher

It's a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons. — Charles Yu