Quotes & Sayings About Illustration

Ah, what a beautiful illustration of the completely open mind - utterly undiscriminating, lacking any criteria for acceptance, blissfully and uncritically according every idea its full respect. But, of course, it's a lie: they don't regard every idea as equally deserving. They clearly consider the atheist idea that the sacraments of their faith are empty foolishness to be an outrage. Rather, what they love is the idea that everyone else must respect their beliefs, no matter what they are, and that any disagreement is an insult. This is exactly the kind of uncritical, unskeptical, nonjudgmental idiocy that all religions seek to promulgate, because they all know that if we tore off the blinders of tradition and artificiality and mindless etiquette, we'd see right through their lies. Respect every idea! Especially mine! And if you find stupid the idea that this cracker is a god, why, you must be disrespectful and no gentleman! My — P.Z. Myers

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form. — Paul Gauguin

A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought): Aide-memoire Reportage Work of art Topography Erotica/Pornography Advertisement Abstract image Literature Text Autobiography Compositional Functional illustration Snapshot — William Boyd

He had suddenly the clearest understanding he had ever had of the way his father had gone so wrong. A man's strength was supposed to be against the outside world; to fight it back from himself and from those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it inward, against the very people you had been given the strength to protect, because you couldn't deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness. — Laura Florand

Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value. — Jeff VanderMeer

What is fatah? We can easily see and resist the effects of jihad in militant terrorism, but we have trouble seeing and resisting the more subtle strategy that the Muslims call fatah. Fatah is infiltration, moving into a country in numbers large enough to affect the culture. It means taking advantage of tolerant laws and accommodative policies to insert the influence of Islam. In places where a military invasion will not succeed, the slow, systematic, and unrelenting methods of fatah are conquering whole nations. An illustration is: A demographic revolution is taking place today in France. Some experts are projecting that by the year 2040, 80 percent of the population of France will be Muslim. At that point the Muslim majority will control commerce, industry, education, and religion. They will also control the government, as well, and occupy all the key positions in the French Parliament. And a Muslim will be president.19 — David Jeremiah

Inking is meditation in liquid form... — J.H. Everett

By the 'mud-sill' theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be
all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all. — Abraham Lincoln

But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again - their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system. — Nadeem Aslam

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling. — Bernard Herrmann

When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device. — Stephen Jay Gould

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications ... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance. — Henry James

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration. — Aaron Siskind

I majored in illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, although I never had any intention of being an illustrator and didn't take any classes in illustration there. It was just that the illustration degree had no requirements. — Brian Selznick

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. — Werner Heisenberg

I've always felt that I was a bit of an outsider to the British children's-book illustration scene, because I don't work in line and wash. — Anthony Browne

Speaking for myself, but [Kriota] probably [agrees], I don't do different things because I have to, but certainly my career's taken a lot of twists and turns because things work out for a while and then something shifts and they don't. I went into illustration as a way of supporting my comics career. Then I got really interested in performance and I knew that was always going to be more of a hobby, but that's something I've kept doing. — Robert Sikoryak

The whole system has been long since swept away, and its records merely remain as illustrations of perverted ingenuity. — Richard A. Proctor

The writing is done on the computer, and the drawing is done by hand. I write, write, write, then I hit the illustration. — Stephan Pastis

There is no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the president is openly violating our nation's laws by authorizing the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. — John Conyers

We accept what Scripture teaches as far as our doctrine is concerned; but when it comes to practice, we very often fail to take the Scriptures as our only guide ... Dare I give an obvious illustration? The question of women preaching, and being ordained to the full ministry. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

I really admire the job that not just coach Belichick has done but that Robert Kraft and his family have done, and the decisions that they made to let Bill do what he's capable of doing. I think it's a great illustration of a way to structure an NFL organization when you let the coach really run the thing. — Pete Carroll

She looks like she's at peace," I hear, over and over. Or "She looks just like herself, don't she?" Neither one of these is true. She looks like an illustration in a book, two-dimensional, when she ought to be leaping off the page. When — Jodi Picoult

The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences. — Jonathan Lethem

Work does not "give" dignity to our lives through the excellence or happiness it fosters. The dignity of work comes less from its ideal promise than from the way we show, through it, a determination to endure what is difficult for the sake of discharging our responsibilities and contributing to society. It is less the source of our happiness than the illustration that we deserve happiness. Through work we reveal our tough minded commitment in the face of conditions that cannot bend exactly to our will. When this commitment brings a partial triumph over an unaccommodating world, work illuminates something of the dignity that resides in us independent of the character of our work. It expresses a kind of defiance, for we willfully ignore the ultimate resistance of a world we yet try to shape. Thus work reveals, though it cannot produce, the dignity of those who take their condition to be at least partly of their own making. — Russell Muirhead

What I remember most clearly is how it felt. I'd just finished painting a red fire engine-like the one I often walked past near my grandparents' house. Suddenly the teachers, whose names I've long forgotten, closed in on my desk. They seemed unusually impressed, and my still dripping fire engine was immediately and ceremoniously pinned up. I don't know what they might have said, but their unexpected attention and having something I'd made given a place of honor on the wall created an overwhelming and totally unfamiliar sense of pride inside me. I loved that feeling, and I wanted to feel it again and again. That desire, I suppose, was the beginning of my career.
I have no idea where my fire engine painting ended up, but I never forgot the basic layout. Several decades later, it served as the inspiration for this sketch for an illustration in a book called Why the chicken crossed the Road. — David Macaulay

An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle. — Charles M. Blow

The gospel is not just the illustration (even the best illustration) of an idea. It is the story of actions by which the human situation is irreversibly changed. — Lesslie Newbigin

As I am writing, another illustration of ye generation of hills proposed above comes into my mind. Milk is as uniform a liquor as ye chaos was. If beer be poured into it & ye mixture let stand till it be dry, the surface of ye curdled substance will appear as rugged & mountanous as the Earth in any place. — Isaac Newton

A lot happened in Vancouver. It was my first Western experience. I learned English, which is my second language. I became very acquainted with Western culture. I had my first sewing machine when I was 9. I trained in fashion illustration when I was in school. — Jason Wu

When I first collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions. — Samuel Johnson

We're all looking at the people around us, the people who have gone before us who have succeeded in recovery and have long-term sobriety and they are an illustration for us of how good it can be. — Scott Stevens

My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I'm a big illustration and comic book fan. In my eyes, comic books and illustration are the same kind of art forms. — Mika.

We imitate each other with slavish devotion and our most strenuous efforts are put forth to try to say the same thing that everyone around us is saying - and yet to find an excuse for saying it, some little safe variation on the approved theme or, if no more, at least a new illustration. — A.W. Tozer

I hope my work isn't dismissed by the critics as illustration or photography. — E. J. Hughes

Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives. — Albert Camus

The transfiguration was a physical illustration of what the renewed mind looks like in the spiritual. — Bill Johnson

I always love design but the more I designed for clients, the less I liked the process of designing for them. I do lettering and illustration for money, which clients don't mess with too much and web design for fun. — Jessica Hische

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that. — Julie Mehretu

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

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Self-surrender is essential and by that is meant the confession of personal impotence. "I can of mine own self do nothing." Since creation is finished it is impossible to force anything into being. The example of magnetism previously given is a good illustration. You cannot make magnetism, it can only be displayed. You cannot make the law of magnetism. If you want to build a magnet, you can do so only by conforming to the law of magnetism. In other words, you surrender yourself or yield to the law. — Neville Goddard

Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If we choose a weak and foolish speculation as a primary textbook illustration (falsely assuming that the tale possesses a weight of history and a sanction of evidence), then we are in for trouble - as critics properly nail the particular weakness, and then assume that the whole theory must be in danger if supporters choose such a fatuous case as a primary illustration. — Stephen Jay Gould

In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader. — Cynthia Leitich Smith

Take the rose - most people think it very beautiful: I don't care for It at all. I prefer the cactus, for the simple reason that it has a more interesting personality. It has wonderfully adapted itself to its surroundings! It is the best illustration of the theory of evolution in plant life. — Charles Proteus Steinmetz

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls. — Zadie Smith

GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportioned to the quantity of matter they contain-the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A. — Ambrose Bierce

Reckless. Insatiable. Deceptive. Clingy. Vain. Dismissive. Trivial. Violent. Tactless. Controlling. Impractical. Fearful. Think of one example in your past where you exhibited each of these traits. Whatever memory comes to your mind will usually provide you with a clear illustration. Know that you have the capacity to exhibit all defects. — Alexandra Katehakis

In truth, ideas and principles are independent of men; the application of them and their illustration is man's duty and merit. The time will come when the author of a view shall be set aside, and the view only taken cognizance of. This will be the millennium of Science. — Edward Forbes

I think the trick of writing a good picture book manuscript is to leave that space for illustration. An illustrated novel can do the same thing. — Mac Barnett

The author relates by way of illustration that the human heart contains both a throne and a cross. If we occupy the one, Jesus occupies the other. — A.W. Tozer

Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that "Whatever is right;" an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong. — Charles Dickens

Once, when I was puzzled to know why there were so many religions, he said: "There is one universal religion, Helen- the religion of love. Love your heavenly father with your whole heart and soul, love every child of God as much as you ever can, and remember that the possibilities of good are greater than the possibilities of evil; and you have the key to heaven." And his life was a happy illustration of this great truth. In this noble soul love and widest knowledge were blended with faith that had become insight. He saw God in all that liberates and lifts, in all that humbles, sweetens and consoles. — Helen Keller

She always seemed dead anyway, but nicely so, like an illustration or an advertisement. — Lucia Berlin

He had seen her painted sign by the road: Skin Illustration! Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic! — Ray Bradbury

It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else's life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable — Alice McDermott

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

Hindu religious literature, indeed all religious literature, is full of illustrations to prove the truth. — Mahatma Gandhi

Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds. — James Clerk Maxwell

At 1.30 she left the hospital to do some shopping. Both men were sound asleep. Gentle afternoon sunlight flooded the room, and I felt as though I might drift off at any moment perching on my stool. Yellow and white chrysanthemums in a vase on the table by the window reminded people it was autumn. In the air floated the sweet smell of boiled fish left over from lunch. The nurses continued to clip-clop up and down the hall, talking to each other in clear, penetrating voices. They would peep into the room now and then and flash me a smile when they saw that both patients were sleeping. I wished I had something to read, but there were no books or magazines or newspapers in the room, just a calendar on the wall. — Haruki Murakami

Jo examined the work of art nearest her, idly wondering what fortuitous concatenation of circumstances needed the melodramatic illustration of an Indian in full war costume, tumbling over a precipice with a wolf at his throat, while two infuriated young gentlemen, with unnaturally small feet and big eyes, were stabbing each other close by, and a disheveled female was flying away in the background — Louisa May Alcott

An illustration I use to get people to understand it is this: I'll ask major corporate audiences: Why don't you just take all your traditional beliefs about organizations, and apply them to the neurons in your brain? — Dee Hock

If on one day we find the fast-spreading recognition of popular rights accompanied by a silent, growing perception of the rights of women, we also find it accompanied by a tendency towards a system of non-coercive education
that is, towards a practical illustration of the rights of children. — Herbert Spencer

A witty illustration or an apt story will accomplish more than columns of argument. — Chauncey Depew

Anyone having to do with medicine will have looked at Frank Netter's art work ... I decided I would make him my model ... getting my degree in medical illustration and then going on to medical school. — David Bolinsky

In Heaven there is no need for sex because there is no need for a shadow or illustration-just a need to enjoy it! — David Berg

When there is no desire for fruit, there is no temptation for untruth or himsa (violence). Take any instance of untruth or violence, and it will be found that at its back was the desire to attain the cherished end. But it may be freely admitted that the Gita was not written to establish ahimsa. It was an accepted and primary duty even before the Gita age. The Gita had to deliver the message of renunciation of fruit. This is clearly brought out as early as the second chapter. 26. But if the Gita believed in ahimsa or it was included in desirelessness, why did the author take a warlike illustration? When the Gita was written, although people believed in ahimsa, wars were not only not taboo, but nobody observed the contradiction between them and ahimsa. — Mahatma Gandhi

Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ordinary society is, in this respect, very like the kind of music to be obtained from an orchestra composed of Russian horns. Each horn has only one note; and the music is produced by each note coming in just at the right moment. In the monotonous sound of a single horn, you have a precise illustration of the effect of most people's minds. How often there seems to be only one thought there! and no room for any other. It is easy to see why people are so bored; and also why they are sociable, why they like to go about in crowds - why mankind is so gregarious. It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable. Omnis stultitia laborat fastidio sui: folly is truly its own burden. Put a great many men together, and you may get some result - some music from your horns! A — Arthur Schopenhauer

The perfect opening is the word imagine, because imagine allows you to communicate in the eyes and the vision of the listener rather than yours. And the best illustration of that is "1984." Room 101 in "1984" - everyone's read it, and we all have our own imagination of what that looks like. — Frank Luntz

Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated. — Robert Wilson

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities
that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration. — Edgar Allan Poe

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently. — Richard Brookhiser

I was at Ground Zero, and it was, to me, such a graphic illustration of what terrorism has done to our world. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

The floating vapour is just as true an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche. — John Burroughs

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Why a child needs a picture book?
Experts explain why the illustration is so important in the narrative and give tips on how to choose a picture book for your children.

By turning an idea into something reality, illustrated book further fuels the child's fantasy. Recent research on teaching concluded that the best performing students are not the ones who read the classics. The important thing is to allow children access to a variety of reading styles and the pleasure of choosing what they want to read. — Jessie Zane Carter

The main difference between illustration and comics is that comics are much, much more work. Every comics page is the equivalent of six to nine illustrations. — Molly Crabapple

Perhaps the most impressive illustration of all is to suppose that you could label the molecules in a tumbler of water ... threw it anywhere you please on the earth, and went away from the earth for a few million years while all the water on the earth, the oceans, rivers, lakes and clouds had had time to mix up perfectly. Now supposing that perfect mixing had taken place, you come back to earth and draw a similar tumbler of water from the nearest tap, how many of those marked molecules would you expect to find in it? Well, the answer is 2000. There are 2000 times more molecules in a tumbler of water than there are tumblers of water in the whole earth. — Francis William Aston

The existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The foot-print in the sand-to refer to his happy illustration-does now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level. — Hugh Miller

This wild emaciated look appeals to some women, though not to many men, who are seldom seen pinning up a Vogue illustration in a machine shop. — Peg Bracken

I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing, because I can't erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings. — Francis Bacon

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

The error in this conclusion may be most simply demonstrated by means of an actual example. Let us select for this purpose the monetary history of Austria, which Laughlin also uses as an illustration. From 1859 onwards the Austrian National Bank was released from the obligation to convert its notes on demand into silver, and nobody could tell when the State paper-money issued in 1866 would be redeemed, or even if it would be redeemed at all. It was not until the later 'nineties that the transition to metallic money was completed by the actual resumption of cash payments on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Bank. — Ludwig Von Mises

He has a number of curious facts in illustration of the power of mere goodness to protect against outrage. — George Combe

I've done illustration on the side. But other than that, comics have been my main things. — Jaime Hernandez

A student researching into my work has actually traced the newspapers and magazines where I found theses images and has found out that many of them illustrate a collection of gruesome stories, murders and suicides which contrast with the images used. There is a contrast between the message carried by the text and that suppressed by the illustration. — Gerhard Richter

I have been illustrating Tolkien's books ever since I first read them, long before illustration became my profession. — John Howe

All in Dali is indeed contrived, a brilliant illustration of his own psyche as he understands it, as opposed to how it truly may have been. — Wendy Beckett

He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back, was another White Rabbit wearing a leather motercycle jacket and boots and smoking a cigar. — Michael Thomas Ford

All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype, — Barbara Kruger

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? — Henry James

What I don't like in movies dealing with the illustration of altered states of consciousness is that usually you see the guy from the outside. — Gaspar Noe

Painting and illustration cannot be mixed - one cannot merge from one into the other. — N. C. Wyeth

Finally she found what she was looking for. "See, child?" she said, holding out a framed illustration that looked as if it had been ripped from a book. In it, a man was being crucified - a black man with an Afro - and up above, floating in the vicinity — Jodi Picoult

A story, in which native humour reigns, Is often useful, always entertains; A graver fact, enlisted on your side, May furnish illustration, well applied; But sedentary weavers of long tales Give me the fidgets, and my patience fails. — William Cowper

In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value. — Jean Baudrillard