Self Portrait Quotes & Sayings

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world . — Agnes Varda

THING TO TRY: If you are asked to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist, describe in precise detail, the features of the police sketch artist. This is one of the rare instances where two people can do one self-portrait. — Demetri Martin

I sat back and looked at it. It was ugly, dark, uncontrolled. Like a monster's face. Or maybe what I saw there was my own face. I couldn't quite tell. Was the face the image of something evil or the image of myself?
"Both," Bea muttered, as if I'd spoken my question out loud. "Of course, it's both. But it shouldn't be. Goodness, no. — Jennifer Brown

Homes, Gamache knew, were a self portrait. A person's choice of color, furnishing, pictures, every touch revealed the individual. God, or the devil, was in the details. And so was the human. Was it dirty, messy, obsessively clean? Were the decorations chosen to impress, or were they a hodgepodge of personal history? Was the space cluttered or clear? He felt a thrill every time he entered a home during an investigation. — Louise Penny

She gives of light. I give off dark. (PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: The Flashlight and the Flashdark — Jandy Nelson

I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can't help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can't help but marvel. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Like the wide hollows of eyes marked in cathedrals of stone that left me half-perplexed as a child. A self-portrait of an innocent in this organic of ephemeral societies. Then I know I will be able to flourish viciously. That's the trouble with remembering. You begin to wish. — Abigail George

Brother, if any man thinks ill of you, do not be angry with him. For you are worse than he thinks you to be. If he charges you falsely on some point, yet be satisfied, for if he knew you better he might change the accusation and you would be no gainer by the correction.
If you have your moral portrait painted and it is ugly, be satisfied. For it only needs a few blacker touches and it would be still nearer the truth. "I will be base in my own sight." This was well said. Perhaps if David had carried it out more fully and had been rendered watchful thereby, it might have saved him from his great fall. A sense of electing love will render you base in your own sight. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like 'Saint George and the Dragon' or 'The Rape of the Sabine Women,' but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. You are every color and brushstroke. — Chuck Palahniuk

Jesus goes up onto the mountain, gathers his disciples around him, and says: "How blessed are the poor, the gentle, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for uprightness, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted in the cause of uprightness." These words present a portrait of the child of God. It is a self-portrait of Jesus, the Beloved Son. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me. — Jacques Derrida

The self-deception of slave owners and proponents of slavery is well documented by the historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in their book Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South. Slavery was not perceived by most slaveholders in the nineteenth century to be an exploitation of humans by other humans for economic gain; instead, slaveholders painted a portrait of slavery as a paternalistic and benign institution in which the slaves themselves were seen as not so different from all laborers - black and white - who toiled everywhere in both free and slave states; further, the South's "Christian slavery" was claimed to be superior. — Michael Shermer

As he went about to the other workrooms he realised that every painting was a self-portrait even when it was a still life or a scene over the roofs of Paris; for no man ever pictured anything but himself, his core, the things that he was basically. With every brush stroke the artist was mercilessly exposed: he could not conceal nothing, he could pretend to be another person, to believe in other values, but in the end he would fool no one. — Irving Stone

Self-deceit is a most damaging trait. The remedy, for an artist, is to paint a self-portrait! — Scott Kahn

I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests. — Joyce Tenneson

He perceived that this memory-jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the room ... — Salman Rushdie

Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become ...
That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's done. — Salman Rushdie

Lange claimed that every photograph was a self-portrait of the photographer. — Geoff Dyer

I kept my word. An hour or two sufficed to sketch my own portrait in crayons; and in less than a fortnight I had completed an ivory miniature of an imaginary Blanche Ingram. It looked a lovely face enough, and when compared with the real head in chalk, the contrast was as great as self-control could desire. I derived benefit from the task: it had kept my head and hands employed, and had given force and fixedness to the new impressions I wished to stamp indelibly on my heart. — Charlotte Bronte

The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture. — Burton Silverman

The humor for me is how far above your head the signature is - it's dislocated from the sign of the artist in such a distinct way that it could almost be a self-portrait of a sort. — Laura Owens

As a way of getting in touch with my origins
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment and the first thing I do — David Berman

I see ... the way you're always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you're older than your years, but still ... playful, like a little girl. How you're always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It's all in the eyes. — Claudia Gray

Balthazar Balsan is not a self-portrait. If he was, I'd have made the character more flattering. — Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Maturity colonizes your adolescent mind, like an ultraviolet photograph of a vast cosmic nebula that turns out, on closer examination, to be a pointillist self-portrait. — Elan Mastai

One chilly autumn evening, he was reminded of the painter by a stalk of corn: the way it stood there armed in its rough coat of leaves, exposing its delicate roots atop the mounded earth like so many nerves, it was also a portrait of his own most vulnerable self. The discovery only served to increase his melancholy. — Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history's in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand. — Chuck Palahniuk

(Self Portrait: Boy Remakes World Before World Remakes Boy) — Jandy Nelson

The selfie era offers a big opening: everybody can do it; nowadays even five-year-olds know how to take a nude self-portrait. — Lucas Samaras

Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait. — Lori Earley

There are certain things - How to say this? OK. Let me give you an example. Can I give you an example? There's a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's at Kenwood House, very close to where we live. It's one of my favorite paintings. I go to see it quite a lot. I start off on a walk on the Heath, and then I find myself there. It's one of the last self-portraits he did. He painted it sometime between 1665 and when he died four years later, bankrupt and alone. Whole stretches of the canvas are bare. There's a hurried intensity in the strokes - you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.
Fran couldn't give two shits about that painting. — Nicole Krauss

They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o'-shanter which wasn't any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.
I was looking at him across my office desk at about four-thirty when the phone rang and I heard a cool, supercilious voice that sounded as if it thought it was pretty good. It said drawlingly, after I had answered:
You are Philip Marlowe, a private detective? — Raymond Chandler

And if what they say is true
if every great painting is really a self-portrait
what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself? — Donna Tartt

SELF PORTRAIT: Throwing Armfuls of Air into the Air — Jandy Nelson

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows. — W. H. Auden

Chess hasn't really influenced my literature. It's true, there's a character in Pigeon Post, an old chess player; but it's more of a wink, a self-portrait and not much more. — Dumitru Tepeneag

The most adventurous journey to embark on; is the journey to yourself, the most exciting thing to discover; is who you really are, the most treasured pieces that you can find; are all the pieces of you, the most special portrait you can recognize; is the portrait of your soul. — C. JoyBell C.

We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It's absurd. We run the risk of warping what's best in us — Andre Gide

Writing will never be perfect in a poet's eye that is why we need people's criticism good or bad, whether or not it gives a positive or negative frame to our work. We are first at hand to fight against the real and the normal in our writing as our outspoken, brimming voice bring truths to light so vividly and intensely for mass consumption that we so long for in our hearts. When the poet, not jubilant, neither spirited, allows his mind to quiet, allows the survival of and realises that all figures of speech matters; when God has witnessed the culmination of his progress; when the writer is almost in a hypnotic stance. Then the poet cannot stop himself when he is in the right place, then he can guess at the intensity, the prowess of his pen, his prolific writing and the intelligence behind his words becomes a self portrait kind of like what Vincent van Gogh used to do when he was depressed and lonely, fighting against the feelings of isolation and rejection by the establishment. — Abigail George

The reason that I'm an actor, or an artist, is ultimately because I'm trying to paint a self-portrait, and the most complete and beautiful self-portrait that you can. — Terrence Howard

The egocentricity which motivated it was not that of the spoiled, but of the too little spoiled; the lonely. Had she been an artist she would have painted a self-portrait; instead she decorated two rooms, charging them with objects which some visitor, some day, would recognize and understand. And through that understanding he would divine all the capacities and longings she had found in herself and was unable to communicate. — Ira Levin

I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird. — Charles Stross

Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection. — Joseph Brodsky

The sketches were uncanny, almost photographic in quality. Reference points were given; the viewers described the surrounding terrain and landmarks. There were even sketches showing the aircraft's location in relation to the Ecuadorean search teams. In every sketch there was a phantom, a transparent body: sort of a self portrait of the viewer in the target area. — David Morehouse

Because it is written by a nineteenth-century American, and because of its closeness to the twentieth century, The Portrait of a Lady foregoes Victorian affirmations. The price it pays, however (together with several twentieth-century novels) is that it eventually leaves the reader, along with its heroine, 'en Vair' amid its self-reflections. — Ian Gregor

- "Who the fuck is this Harry charakter?" "Superwoman, by all accounts. — Kate Tempest

Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change - Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving - forever Changing. The universe is God's self-portrait. — Octavia E. Butler

Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait ... self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well ... an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century. — Yasumasa Morimura

In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do. — Richard Schmid

Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy. — John Carroll

Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it's a bit of a self-portrait. I think it's impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening. — John Sexton

I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own. — Harold Bloom

When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the blemishes - they're not part of the good picture you want. — Andy Warhol

I see myself through others eyes and I am made anew. — Molly Moore

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing. — Vincent Van Gogh

Yet each of us also carries another portrait with us, a picture far more important than any in our wallet. Psychologists have a name for it. They call that mental picture of ourselves, our self-image ... there's always the person whose self-image is bent all out of shape, like a photo carried too long in a wallet.The good news of the tremendous worth we have in God's eyes can light up our inner self-portrait. — Josh McDowell

I don't want security - to be self-assured - I want to risk my heart in making your portrait and be paid the wages of your devotion ... — John Geddes

Hold still we're going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away. — Helene Cixous

Recent scholarship confirms the portrait of John F. Kennedy sketched by his brother in Thirteen Days: a remarkably cool, thoughtful, nonhysterical, self-possessed leader, aware of the weight of decision, incisive in his questions, firm in his judgment, always in charge, steering his advisers perseveringly in the direction he wanted to go. "We are only now coming to understand the role he played in it," writes John Lewis Gaddis, the premier historian of the Cold War. — Robert F. Kennedy

Self-Portrait at Twenty"

I stood inside myself
like a dead tree or a tower.
I pulled the rope
of braided hair
and high above me
a bell of leaves tolled.

Because my hand
stabbed its brother,
I said: Make it stone.

Because my tongue
spoke harshly, I said:
Make it dust.
And yet
it was not death, but
her body in its green dress
I longed for. That's why
I stood for days in the field
until the grass turned black
and the rain came. — Gregory Orr

If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion. — Philippe Petit

'Empire of Self' is a loving portrait of a very difficult man. Jay Parini, himself a gifted novelist, poet and biographer, has gone very deep into the 'black energy' of Gore Vidal's relentless narcissism and megalomania. Parini envisions an epic battle between Vidal's angelic and demonic sides, yet there's very little of the angel in Vidal. — Jerome Charyn

OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine,-
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Logan's donating a sculpture to the town. He didn't want to make a big deal about it--wanted it on the down low, so they're doing a small unveiling."

"Down low, Gwen?"

"I know, aren't I cool?"

We all turn back to the scene across the street. I ask, "What do you think it is?"

"I hope it's a self-portrait, a nude one." Josh sighs.

Gwen and I eye him, but he has the faraway dreamy look about him. Clearly he's envisioning Logan naked. I lean over and whisper, "Whatever you're thinking, it's better."

His eyes narrow at me. "You are a hateful woman. — L.A. Fiore

A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together. — Eric Kandel

It's improbable for me to become lost, because I am already self-realized. A blank scene is a portrait of a glass kingdom to me. In order to become lost, one must not be able to realize their own identity, ego, and self. — Lionel Suggs

Attempt something creative that you have never tried before. Write a poem, draw a self-portrait, design the plot for a movie, or tackle some other creative activity. Even spending just a few minutes working creatively on something can help you relax and spark new ideas that are relevant to other parts of your life. — Max Ogles

I still don't know what kind of woman I am. But as the flame nears the fingers that trust the match, as close as the skin can stand it to singe, I call this the nerve to find out.

-Self Portrait Of A Woman Standing Outside Your House With A Match And A Gallon Of Gasoline — Ashley Toliver

The missing girl - there had been unceasing news reports, always flashing to that achingly ordinary school portrait of the vanished teen, you know the one, with the rainbow-swirl background, the girl's hair too straight, her smile too self-conscious, then a quick cut to the worried parents on the front lawn, microphones surrounding them, Mom silently tearful, Dad reading a statement with quivering lip - that girl, that missing girl had just walked past Edna Skylar. — Harlan Coben

I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself. — Jamie Wyeth

Everything in a wide sense is a kind of a self-portrait. It's just the way you see things and you're curious about certain things and just excited about them. — Jurgen Teller

If you come a little closer you will see that I am depicted as having three penises. Of course I'm not insinuating that I actually have three penises or even two. I have one. This is called symbolism. Is it symbolic in the sense that making love to me feels like I have three penises? Again, I can't answer that, but probably, yeah. — Colin Nissan

Your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary. — Chuck Palahniuk

I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women ... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night ... Who ever wants to know something about me ... ought to look carefully at my pictures. — Gustav Klimt

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I'm at the age where I don't need an acid trip to feel naked ... to feel that I don't exist. Now a self-portrait is almost a reminder to me that I do exist. — Francesco Clemente

There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne's death - George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother's hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten - the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's — William Makepeace Thackeray

... there is endless despair at the centre of every narcissistic self-portrait. — M. John Harrison

The mirror is the tool of the one who wants to do a self-portrait. And if you want to make a photo you need a mirror. — Agnes Varda

Bodybuilding is an art, your body is the canvas, weights are your brush and nutrition is your paint. We all have the ability to turn a self portrait into a masterpiece. — Kai Greene

And yet, despite this portrait of a self assured woman, Cindy seemed to have a near obsession with being where everyone was and doing what everyone was doing. — Imbolo Mbue

To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, "so that he would see whether I knew myself or not." The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled 'Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.' He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. "I read his remarks again and again, many times [Catherine later recalled in her memoirs]. I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: 'What a pity that you will marry! I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me. — Robert K. Massie

I've had a reoccurring dream about hanging out with Britney Spears, so maybe it would be fun to chill with her for a bit? Like, see what makes her tick. I had this dream once about Britney, that we were going to get married or something, and so I had to meet her parents but we were stuck on a beach in these sand dunes - and at this point between the dreams and self-portrait, you know way too much about me. — Gabriel Mann

His face - what would it have become? While calling him back in memory I have been haunted by the idea of the unalterable features of those who have died in youth. Borne away from them by the years, we - with our time-troubled looks and diminished alertness - have submitted to many a gradual detriment of change. But the young poet of twenty-five years ago remains his world-discovering self. His futureless eyes encounter ours from the faintly smiling portrait, unconscious of the privilege and deprivation of never growing old, unconscious of the dramatic illusion of completeness that he is destined to create. — Siegfried Sassoon

When I draw my caricature self-portrait, I always do a huge smile. — Rolf Harris

Have you come to help Me?"

The sensayer waited, uncertain whether the words were meant for her. "Help you how?" she asked.

The stone-still Speaker did not turn. "To understand the God Who made this portrait of Himself."

Carlyle looked to the altarpiece, the choirs of Heaven shimmering in their concentric circles of cracking paint and gold. "People made that, human beings searching for their own understanding."

"If God made Man and Man made this, it is still a Self-portrait. — Ada Palmer

There is no self-portrait of me. — Gustav Klimt

It says in the Bible, in plain words, that God made a self-portrait. He created man in His own image - man and woman - for God is Love.Why should we start thinking of a god up in the clouds with wings, if He dwells within us in the spirit of Love?! — Thor Heyerdahl

The gummy bears tattoo was my idea. It's my son's favorite candy. The sketch was my other son's idea. It's a self-portrait of himself. I just showed the artist his sketch and had him tattoo it on my forearm. It looks like a stick person with big hair. It's pretty funny. — Prince Fielder

Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are. — Rosamund Lupton