Quotes & Sayings About The Art Of Calligraphy

When I first started doing these roasts in the mid '90s, they were a lost art, like jousting or calligraphy. But I feel like roasts help tame the room and let off steam ... It's like it's all being handled by professionals. — Jeff Ross

Wabi means spare, impoverished; simple and functional. It connotes a transcendence of fad and fashion. The spirit of wabi imbues all the Zen arts, from calligraphy to karate, from the tea ceremony to Zen archery. — Shunryu Suzuki

Just as writing can become calligraphy when it's creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement - the art of living. — H.E. Davey

Lettering creates readable art that comes to life, displaying a quirky, whimsical nature. — Peggy Dean

Writing beautifully - calligraphy - was China's first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to write beautifully, and then you painted. After mastering those twin skills, you could move on to writing poetry, but many chose to remain just calligraphers, a highly appreciated art form in China. Another — Mark Kurlansky

Calligraphy, a spiritual art that has been forgotten in favor of an emotionless keyboard. — Stefan Boldisor

In some Arab art exhibitions that have happened, there's always this idea that the East is more traditional; they show a lot of works on calligraphy and religion. — Massimiliano Gioni

On pristine parchment I draw with my skis calligraphic lines of joy, writing poems of movement. — Patricia Robin Woodruff

Look at a skilled blacksmith working steel. To the untrained eye, he's merely repeating the same hammer blows, but anyone trained in the art of calligraphy knows that each time the blacksmith lifts the hammer and brings it down, the intensity of the blow is different.
The hand repeats the same gesture, but as it approaches the metal it understands that it must touch it with more or less force. It's the same thing with repetition: it may seem the same, but it's always different. The moment will come when you no longer think about what you're doing. You become the letter, the ink, the paper, the word. — Paulo Coelho

Once there was a dictator. He drove millions to various kinds of deaths, by war, in prison, or simply in harsh deserts farming their lives away. He destroyed temples, burned books, and ruined the art of calligraphy. He wrote terrible poetry and forced everyone to learn it, so destroying the literary taste of one quarter of humanity. He remained a warrior even as Chairman. He was at his best as a warrior, because as a warrior, he was fighting for his people, dreaming for them. After that, he only ground them down. But I forgive him for saying one beautiful thing:
'Women hold up half the sky.'
Chairman Mao Tse Tung — Geoff Ryman

There is nothing in the Quran or early Muslim religious literature to suggest an iconoclastic attitude. Grabar has argued that Muslim calligraphy and vegetal arts were most likely a pragmatic adaptation to the need for a new imperial-Islamic emblem distinct from the Byzantine and Sasanian portraits of emperors. The use of vegetal designs and writing was prior to any religious theory about them. Once adopted, they became the norm for Islamic public art. Theories about Islamic iconoclasm were developed later. — Ira M. Lapidus

Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically. — Plato

Her life was like a burst of wild, flowing Chinese calligraphy, written under the influence of alcohol. — Zhou Weihui

Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but ... also betrays his heart rate, his breathing. — Dai Sijie