Modersohn Becker Quotes & Sayings

I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I'd rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one. — Gregory Maguire

I love color. It must submit to me. And I love art. I kneel before it, and it must become mine. Everything around me glows with passion. Every day reveals a new red flower, glowing, scarlet red. Everyone around me carries them. Some wear them quietly hidden in their hearts. And they are like poppies just opening, of which one can see only here and there a hint of red petal peeking out from the green bud. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

I know I shall not live very long ... If I've painted three good pictures, then I shall leave gladly with flowers in my hand and my hair. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

In art one is usually totally alone with oneself. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

I must learn to express the gentle vibration of things: the intrinsically rough texture. I must find this expression in drawings; in the way in which I draw my nudes here in Paris, more original and at the same time sensitively observed. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

Recalibration comes from experiencing Nothingness, being open to emptiness as the ultimate reality and our nature. It is the purest mind, the Energy-Consciousness itself. — Ilchi Lee

I think the time is coming for struggle and uncertainty. It comes into every serious and beautiful life. I knew all along that it had to come. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

I believe that one should not think too much about nature when painting, at least not during the painting's conception. The colour sketch should be made exactly as one has perceived things in nature. But personal feeling is the main thing. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

I want to give colors intoxication, fullness, excitement, power by trying to forget Impressionism. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

It is my experience that marriage does not make one happier. It destroys the illusion that has been the essence of one's previous existence, that there existed something like a soul-mate. The feeling of not being understood is heightened in marriage by the fact that one's entire life beforehand had the aim of finding a being who would understand one. But isn't it better to exist without such an illusion and look this great lonely truth straight in the eye? — Paula Modersohn-Becker

I have to say that being a vegan in 1986 or whenever was a lot different than being a vegan in 2012. You'd go to health foods stores and basically your choice was between Mung beans and nutritional yeast, and that's about it. — Moby

The one thing that always bothered me when I played in the NBA was I really got irritated when they put a white guy on me. — Larry Bird

Worpswede, Worpswede, I cannot get you out of my mind ... Your magnificent pine trees! I call them my men
thick, gnarled, powerful, and tall
yet with the most delicate nerves and fibers in them. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

Yet she belongs, finally and truly, only to God. The hijab is a symbol of freedom from the male regard, but also, in our time, of freedom from subjugation by the iron fist of materialism, deterministic science, and the death of meaning. It denotes softness, otherness, inwardness. She is not only caught in a world of power relations, but she inhabits a world of love and sacrifice. This freedom, which is of the conscience, is hers to exercise as she will. — Abdal Hakim Murad

Anything that happens after I write a song ... that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it. — Guy Clark

The Louvre! The Louvre has me in its clutches. Every time I'm there rich blessings rain down upon me. I am coming to understand Titian more and more and learning to love him. And then there is Botticelli's sweet Madonna, with red roses behind her, standing against a blue-green sky. And Fiesole with his poignant little biblical stories, so simply told, often so glorious in their colors. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

How happy I would be if I could give figurative expression to the unconscious feeling that often murmurs so softly and sweetly within me. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

Women don't paint very well. It's a fact. There are, of course, exceptions. Agnes Martin or, from the past, Paula Modersohn-Becker. — Georg Baselitz

Lack of money rivets us firmly to the ground, one's wings are clipped. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

Nature is supposed to become greater to me than people. It ought to speak louder from me. I should feel small in the face of nature's enormity. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

The deepest joys and blessings in life are associated with family, parenthood, and sacrifice. — Ezra Taft Benson

We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional ... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside. — Paula Modersohn-Becker