Brancusi's Quotes

#1. If I'm taking a picture of Brancusi's grave, I know that there's something of him, of his mortal remains, beneath my feet, and there's something beautiful about that.

Patti Smith

#2. Brancusi made me realise that what I had learned previously - the quick ways of doing things - was all wrong. It is a search you have to enter - into yourself.

Isamu Noguchi

#3. They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

Constantin Brancusi

#4. There hasn't been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

Constantin Brancusi

#5. Nothing grows well in the shade of a big tree.

Constantin Brancusi

#6. The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Constantin Brancusi

#7. Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

Constantin Brancusi

#8. Simplicity is not an objective in art, but one achieves simplicity despite one's self by entering into the real sense of things.

Constantin Brancusi

#9. In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.

Constantin Brancusi

#10. I ground matter to find the continuous line. And when I realized I could not find it, I stopped, as if an unseen someone had slapped my hands.

Constantin Brancusi

#11. Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god.

Constantin Brancusi

#12. Don't look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.

Constantin Brancusi

#13. What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things ... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.

Constantin Brancusi

#14. I refused [to study under Rodin] because nothing grows under large trees.

Constantin Brancusi

#15. The work of art expresses precisely those things which do not die. It must do so, however, in a form that bears witness to the artist's own era.

Constantin Brancusi

#16. Nothing can grow under big trees.

Constantin Brancusi

#17. Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Constantin Brancusi

#18. Why write [about my art]? Why not just show the photographs?

Constantin Brancusi

#19. Theories are patterns without value. What counts is action.

Constantin Brancusi

#20. Work like a slave; order like a king; create like a god.

Constantin Brancusi

#21. Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.

Constantin Brancusi

#22. Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca.

Patti Smith

#23. When we are no longer children we are already dead

Constantin Brancusi

#24. Brancusi has his medium: Picasso, Faulkner, Shostakovich, theirs. Mine happens to be cloth.

Charles James

#25. To see far is one thing, going there is another.

Constantin Brancusi

#26. I do not aspire to be in fashion. For what is in fashion, goes out of fashion
If, on the contrary, your work is contested today, it doesn't matter.
For when it is finally understood, it will be for eternity.

Constantin Brancusi

#27. Simplicity is complexity resolved

Constantin Brancusi

#28. Whoever does not detach himself from the ego never attains the Absolute and never deciphers life.

Constantin Brancusi

#29. I want just the flash of its spirit.

Constantin Brancusi

#30. Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Constantin Brancusi