Quotes & Sayings About Goya

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya. — Igor Stravinsky

Monsters are the result of the sleep of reason. — Francisco Goya

But where do they find these lines in nature? I can only see luminous or obscure masses, planes that advance or planes that recede, reliefs or background. My eye never catches lines or details. — Francisco Goya

I have now established myself in a most enviable manner. Those who require something of me must seek me out - I remain apart. I work for no one unless he is a high-ranking personality or a friend. — Francisco Goya

The sleep of reason produces monsters. — Francisco Goya

Of course, the camera is a far more objective and trustworthy witness than a human being. We know that a Brueghel or Goya or James Ensor can have visions or hallucinations, but it is generally admitted that a camera can photograph only what is actually there, standing in the real world before its lens. — Hannah Hoch

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. — John Berryman

I have had three masters, Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. — Francisco Goya

In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
'suffering humanity — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

First be a magnificent artist and then you can do whatever, but the art must be first. — Francisco Goya

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend. — William Gibson

I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me. — Lebbeus Woods

Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence ... — Michel Foucault

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people. — Stevie Nicks

I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art. — Francisco Goya

With all my work, I have not more, with my shares in the bank and the Academy, than twelve or thirteen thousand reales a year, and with all this, I am as contented as the happiest man on earth. — Francisco Goya

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest. — Pablo Picasso

The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty. — Francisco Goya

Cliff swallows come back to Capistrano Mid-March. It takes them 3 weeks to fly 7,000 miles from Goya, Argentina. — Diana Hollingsworth Gessler

In art, there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait. — Francisco Goya

To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier. — W. H. Auden

You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry. — Isaac Mizrahi

Die young, stay pretty. Blondie, right? We think of it as a modern phenomenon, the whole youth thing, but really, consider all those great portraits, some of them centuries old. Those goddesses of Botticelli and Rubens, Goya's Maja, Madame X. Consider Manet's Olympia, which shocked at the time, he having painted his mistress with the same voluptuous adulation generally reserved for the aristocratic good girls who posed for depictions of goddesses. Hardly anyone knows anymore, and no one cares, that Olympia was Manet's whore; although there's every reason to imagine that, in life, she was foolish and vulgar and not entirely hygienic (Paris in the 1860s being what it was). She's immortal now, she's a great historic beauty, having been scrubbed clean by the attention of a great artist. And okay, we can't help but notice that Manet did not choose to paint her twenty years later, when time had started doing its work. The world has always worshipped nascence. Goddamn the world. — Michael Cunningham

His [Francisco Goya's] debt to the Christianity of the eighteenth century is contained in the idea that politics was just adopting from the Gospels: the conviction that man has a right to justice. Such a statement would seem utterly conceited to a Roman, who would doubtless have looked upon the Disasters as we look upon photographs of the amphitheatre ... But if Goya thought that man has not come onto the earth to be cut to pieces he thought that he must have come here for something. Is it to live in joy and honour? Not only that; it is to come to terms with the world. And the message he never ceased to preach, a message underlined by war, is that man only comes to terms with the world by blinding himself with childishness. — Andre Malraux

El Sueno de la razon produce monstrous. (The sleep of reason breeds monsters) — Francisco De Goya

I remember when you used to have your profession on your passport and I always thought that being a painter was the best one to be, because my heroes were Goya and Francis Bacon. — Damien Hirst

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course. — Clive Barker

Always lines, never forms! But where do they find these lines in Nature? For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow. — Francisco De Goya Y Lucientes

Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were the great painters. I am only a public clown. — Pablo Picasso

The reason for which Picasso was compelled to resort to signs and allegories should now be clear enough: his utter political helplessness in the face of a historical situation which he set out to record; his titanic effort to confront a particular historical event with an allegedly eternal truth; his desire to give hope and comfort and to provide a happy ending, to compensate for the terror, the destruction, and inhumanity of the event. Picasso did not see what Goya had already seen, namely, that the course of history can be changed only by historical means and only if men shape their own history instead of acting as the automaton of an earthly power or an allegedly eternal idea. — Max Raphael

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons. — Francisco Goya

education and money. I go to church with the kids for the same reason Genie and I play our grandchildren classical music and litter the floors and chairs all over our home with open art books. Jack, age three, eats his lunch with a big Goya book propped in front of him asking for the — Frank Schaeffer

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels. — Francisco De Goya

[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too. — Audrey Niffenegger

Painting, like poetry, selects in the universe whatever she deems most appropriate to her ends. She assembles in a single fantastic personage, circumstances and features which nature distributes among many individuals. From this combination, ingeniously composed, results that happy imitation by virtue of which the artist earns the title of inventor and not of servile copyist. — Francisco Goya

I have just returned from Arenas and feel very tired. His Excellency loaded me with a thousand honours; I have painted his portrait and that of his wife and boy and girl with unexpected success, for other artists had been there previously and not been successful. — Francisco Goya

I am beginning to have more powerful enemies and more envious ones, too. — Francisco Goya

The act of painting is about one heart telling another heart where he found salvation. — Francisco Goya

Goya's savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning." — Simone De Beauvoir

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence. — Sam Taylor-Johnson

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? — Ralph Ellison

When I was in high school, I was lucky enough to be an exchange student to a small town in Argentina called Goya. — Patrick Wang

By the end of the twentieth century Interpol was ranking art crime as one of the world's most profitable criminal activities, second only to drug smuggling and weapons dealing. The three activities were related: Drug pushers were moving stolen and smuggled art down the same pipelines they used for narcotics, and terrorists were using looted antiquities to fund their activities. This latter trend began in 1974, when the IRA stole $32 million worth of paintings by Rubens, Goya, and Vermeer. In 2001, the Taliban looted the Kabul museum and "washed" the stolen works in Switzerland. Stolen art was much more easily transportable than drugs or arms. A customs canine, after all, could hardly be expected to tell the difference between a crap Kandinksy and a credible one. — Laney Salisbury