Top 100 Portrait Quotes
#1. In every country is a word which attempts the sound of cats, to match an inisolable portrait in the clouds to a din in the air. But the constant noise is not an omen of music to come.
Lyn Hejinian
#2. I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.
Frida Kahlo
#3. When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's meant to talk to you; it's meant to shame you. It's meant to scream out at you, and it has a message.
Don McCullin
#4. Long-dead men leered at them from heavy gilt frames and Eliza thought how ghastly it must be to have one's portrait painted, to sit still for so long, all so that a layer of oneself could be left forever on a canvas,
Kate Morton
#5. According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
Alain De Botton
#6. Fellow-Christians, do let us study the Bible portrait of the humble man. And let us ask our brethren, and ask the world, whether they recognize in us the likeness to the original.
Andrew Murray
#7. At that time many of the men looked like Rupert Brooke, whose portrait still hung in everyone's imagination.
Muriel Spark
#8. To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.
Neil Gaiman
#9. No artist has painted
A true portrait of Lenin
Ages to come will complete
Lenin's unfinished portrait.
Did Poletaev understand the tragic implication of his lines about Lenin? (pg179)
Vasily Grossman
#10. I have just returned from Arenas and feel very tired. His Excellency loaded me with a thousand honours; I have painted his portrait and that of his wife and boy and girl with unexpected success, for other artists had been there previously and not been successful.
Francisco Goya
#11. Enoch considered the defiance in the painted eyes and the subtle perversion expressed with curling lips, and then he touched a pair of frozen lips as if the smiling portrait might whisper some secret word into his hand.
W.H. Pugmire
#12. Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.
Ira Glass
#13. Pre-planning is essential. Research, research, research. If you are going to do a portrait, know as much as you can about the person beforehand. The web makes this very easy.
Peter Menzel
#14. I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavourable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.
George Eliot
#15. 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.
#16. Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.
Blaise Pascal
#17. Magnus thought of James Herondale, burning up with too much light, too much love,too much, too much- while the boy in the portrait was as lovely as a dying poet, with the fragile beauty of a candle about to gutter out.
Cassandra Clare
#18. Mr. Boffin, as if he were about to have his portrait painted, or to be electrified, or to be made a Freemason, or to be placed at any other solitary disadvantage, ascended the rostrum prepared for him.
Charles Dickens
#19. You are the greatest poem ever written.
You are the greatest song ever sung.
You are the greatest portrait ever painted.
You are the greatest symphony ever composed.
You are the greatest act ever performed.
You are the greatest masterpiece ever created.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#20. Our kids need us to be the dad, not a fun single uncle. When you can replace your 007 poster with a framed portrait of Grandma, your kids will experience an underlying sense of being at home when they are with you - whether for a weekend, a summer, or full-time.
Tez Brooks
#21. When she drew, she didn't feel as if she worked with only charcoal and paper. In drawing a portrait, her medium was the soul itself.
Brandon Sanderson
#22. 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
#23. What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.
Gilbert Stuart
#24. War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It's ugly, and you don't even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know.
Laini Taylor
#25. Self-deceit is a most damaging trait. The remedy, for an artist, is to paint a self-portrait!
Scott Kahn
#26. The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.
Emily Bronte
#27. 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
#28. The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.
Jacob Epstein
#29. I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
Salvador Dali
#30. A vivid portrait of a teenage girl and her family in disarray. Meredith is a wonderful narrator, witty, feisty, full of yearning, and the story she tells is as complicated as life itself. This is a richly satisfying novel.
Margot Livesey
#31. Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.
Jill Lepore
#32. 'The Portrait of Dorian Grey' beautifully articulates how the altruistic part of ourselves clashes with our essentially narcissistic state.
Walton Goggins
#33. The woman in front of him seemed like the work of an artist who had taken the few lines that sketched out a teenager and added color and shape to create a full portrait.
John Katzenbach
#34. When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#35. I'm related to the portrait painter George Romney.
Wavy Gravy
#36. The soldier in the portrait had been a respected and admired officer...
The man he had become was fighting a different battle now. He had his demons, just as she had her ghosts.
Marguerite Kaye
#37. Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.
Aravind Adiga
#38. My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages.
Amos Bronson Alcott
#39. A portrait,' she had said, 'should be that of a person who was breathing at the time it was painted.It should capture one of those breaths.
Amy Tan
#40. Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.
Jimmy Page
#41. Balthazar Balsan is not a self-portrait. If he was, I'd have made the character more flattering.
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
#42. You shouldn't need 60 full minutes to create a portrait that an audience doesn't forget. You should be able to make an impression that's lasting and resonant with one scene.
Chris Bauer
#43. Is it possible that the portrait of the divine Son of God is an exaggeration, at best, or a complete fabrication, at worst, of the original Jesus?
John Clayton
#44. Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
George Eliot
#45. The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.
Galen Rowell
#46. Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#47. I've always had a healthy disregard for authority - it allows me to do my job as a portrait photographer and not as someone who is playing the power game.
Platon
#48. My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.
Annie Leibovitz
#49. 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
#50. A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter ... one must paint its atmosphere.
Umberto Boccioni
#51. wider scene, you can flip the camera to the portrait style and
Albert Peters
#52. Sculpture may be almost anything: a monument, a statue, an old coin, a bas-relief, a portrait bust, a lifelong struggle against heavy odds.
Malvina Hoffman
#53. Do not think, as you read this, that I am painting my own portrait. Be patient, it is only my model.
Colette
#54. What are other people to us? Material. The stuff of our work. Whom do we love more, the girl or the portrait, the thing we've made of her? We artists, we're not quite human, are we? We love no one.
David Gordon
#55. So, did I work with Warhol? I worked with him less on that play then I did on other things. He actually did a portrait of my rabbit and some other stuff. Warhol was definitely ... Warhol.
Harvey Fierstein
#56. It's funny: when you're tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I'd insist that they include the halo. But when you're unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell.
Ted Chiang
#57. To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.
Alfred Stieglitz
#58. If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.
John Piper
#59. My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest.
Ellsworth Kelly
#60. A triumphant grin on his face, dressed in a familiar suit made of slippery-looking material, but with a portrait of another author whom only a very devoted reader would recognize,
Lemony Snicket
#61. It's one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it's another thing to make a portrait of who they are.
Paul Caponigro
#62. The moment seemed right to me for a full and, if possible, authoritative portrait of the life and character of the Prince of Wales.
Jonathan Dimbleby
#63. Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.
Dana Spiotta
#64. 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
#65. Love is not me being who you want. Your definition is a whirlpool trying to suck me in and I'm drowning. Don't you see?...It's time...Time you stop telling me who to be, how to live. This is my portrait. You chose your canvas. Let me choose mine.
Nikki Grimes
#66. [Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?
Queen Elizabeth II
#67. 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
#68. With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
Clement Greenberg
#69. Qabalah is a portrait of what it means to be human, what it means to be divine and exist. That is what the theory of Qabalah is meant to accomplish. And tarot is that same exact portrait, done as a deck of cards. It is a portrait of the workings of the invisible universe.
Wald Amberstone
#70. There is a myth that the portrait photographer is supposed to make the subject relax, and that's the real person. But I'm interested in whatever is going on. And I'm not that comfortable myself.
Annie Leibovitz
#71. A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
#72. The diagram of the house is a portrait of the family, a true portrait, whether it's sad or happy.
Jimenez Lai
#73. I love signing autographs! Sometimes, when people ask me for one, I keep the photo for myself and frame it. It's a Win-Win situation really; I get an extra 25 dollars in my pocket AND another portrait for my bedroom.
Zach Braff
#74. He moved farther into the room and sat on a pink ruffled stool. Alex couldn't help but chuckle at the picture he made. Looking down at his seat, he joined her in laughter, saying, "Not exactly the portrait of lordliness?" She covered her smile and shook her head. "Not exactly." He
Sarah MacLean
#75. In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all-too-comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost.
Alice Sebold
#77. To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.
Alexander Smith
#78. The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#79. I was hoping to do an impressionist painting, but I wanted a good likeness and I wanted to create a feeling of the lady as a person, as a human being rather than as a figurehead for the monarchy and a pomp-and-circumstance sort of formal portrait. I wanted more of a relaxed portrait.
Rolf Harris
#80. The dog is the perfect portrait subject. He doesn't pose. He isn't aware of the camera.
Patrick Demarchelier
#81. Over a species of altar, and beneath a canopy of blue velvet, surmounted by white and red plumes, was a full-length portrait of Anne of Austria, so perfect in its resemblance that d'Artagnan uttered a cry of surprise on beholding it.
Alexandre Dumas
#82. I've got a portrait in the Smithsonian. Who ever thought that would happen?
Tommy Lasorda
#83. In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years
Oscar Wilde
#84. I do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.
Richard Greenberg
#85. I painted with my husband a portrait of a naked Serge Gainsbourg draped with a French flag, and it hangs in our bedroom. I love gritty and dark art like what the German couple Herakut does.
Stephanie Szostak
#86. I do have my own personal convictions and values, and I live by those. But as an artist, as a portrait photographer, my job is to tell the truth and to capture someone's spirit on a certain day. And it's never the whole truth; it's the truth I experience in a very intense and intimate fashion.
Platon
#87. A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.
Mark Kurlansky
#88. Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.
Salvador Dali
#89. When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.
Pablo Picasso
#90. In some circles Stalin has in fact been making a comeback. His portrait hangs above the dashboard of trucks, a symbol of blue- collar nostalgia for a tough leader.
Serge Schmemann
#91. I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.
Lee Iacocca
#92. Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.
Pedro Almodovar
#93. Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
Oscar Wilde
#94. The portrait of his past was partially erased by God and he is searching for those erased portions.
Durgesh Satpathy
#95. In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
Annie Leibovitz
#96. For the surf idol Duke Kahanamoku portrait, which I created for the Surfrider Foundation, I took a photo from a book cover and abstracted the photo image into a drawing. This drawing was laminated onto a surfboard and auctioned to a buyer.
John Van Hamersveld
#97. Whatever these futilities of mine may be, I have no intention of hiding them any more than I would a bald and grizzled portrait of myself. These are my humours, my opinions, things which I believe, not to be believed. My aim is reveal myself which may well be different tomorrow.
Michel De Montaigne
#98. It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.
Max Beerbohm
#100. Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres's portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning.
Alain De Botton
