Top 100 Portrait Quotes
#1. Portrait The world spreads out on either side no farther than the heart is wide.
Emily Dickinson
#2. The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
Jamie Wyeth
#3. In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted.
Bill Bryson
#4. ... although her mouth uttered fond words, her eyes spoke only venom.
Jasper Fforde
#5. He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.
Tanith Lee
#6. A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
Richard Avedon
#7. I would paint a portrait which would bring the tears, had I canvas for it, and the scene should be
solitude, and the figures
solitude
and the lights and shades, each a solitude.
Emily Dickinson
#8. Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.
David Cobley
#9. I wasn't - " I began.
I didn't - " He began.
How charming," V'lane cut us off. His voice arrived before he did. "The very portrait of human domestic bliss. She's on the floor, you're towering over her. Did he strike you, MacKayla? Say the word and I'll kill him.
Karen Marie Moning
#10. Portrait painters' mission is to portray people and the beauty of Creation. They should stay clear of ego ...
Igor Babailov
#11. We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
Jean Cocteau
#12. We felt that we were a portrait on the wall, more invisible the longer it had been in its location
TaraShea Nesbit
#13. We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.
Pamela Hansford Johnson
#15. A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
Richard Avedon
#16. I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves.
Emily Dickinson
#17. Follow your heart and what it's saying,
after you die, an when you live.
What he/ she lives is what she/he is giving to you .
Enjoy it and you'll be happy.
Love isn't a game ,love is a portrait, of a beautiful butterfly flapping it's wings to the horizon.
Avis
#18. Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.
Tom Shales
#19. From the first shock of the contemplation of a face depends the principal sensation which guides me throughout the entire execution of a portrait.
Henri Matisse
#20. durable. Guidelines to start the MPS portrait In this session we start with the first step: collecting data from others. From this range of feedback you will learn important things about yourself: The responses from your contacts will
Juan Humberto Young
#21. Artists with the lack of proper education and experience of working from life will copy whatever is visible on the photograph, without knowing what's underneath. As a result, instead of creating the in-depth and full of character portrait, they draw a mask with no soul.
Igor Babailov
#22. It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#23. Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.
Erwin McManus
#24. She gives of light. I give off dark. (PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: The Flashlight and the Flashdark
Jandy Nelson
#25. The final portrait is often furthest from the truth.
Dave Cullen
#26. The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
Rebecca West
#27. A family portrait is only complete with love to fill it's frame.
Wes Fesler
#28. 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
#29. I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them ...
Carol Rifka Brunt
#30. The Indians say to draw someone's portrait is to steal their soul, i am taking photographs, does it mean that i am just borrowing them?
T.A
#31. Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?
Johnny Carson
#32. In front of the model I work with the same will to reproduce truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into it; it directs me. I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me.
Auguste Rodin
#34. (Self Portrait: Boy Remakes World Before World Remakes Boy)
Jandy Nelson
#35. [Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
Gertrude Atherton
#36. The length of exposure (one minute in sunlight) is still too long for the portrait. It was fifteen minutes when I first began my work. Progress may continue.
Gabriel Lippmann
#37. 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
#38. Waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life.
Oscar Wilde
#39. Suffering is a form of egoism.
I speak only of myself. I am not talking about her, saying what she was, making an overwhelming portrait (like the one Gide made of Madeleine).
(Yet: everything is true: the sweetness, the energy, the nobility, the kindness.)
Roland Barthes
#40. As trait after trait swings into focus and fulfillment, can we write any other name under Isaiah's amazing portrait of the sublime Sufferer in Chapter 53 than Jesus of Nazareth?
J. Sidlow Baxter
#41. Ethnography literally means 'a portrait of a people.' An ethnography is a written description of a particular culture - the customs, beliefs, and behavior - based on information collected through fieldwork.
Marvin Harris
#42. You will never see a portrait of my love, for miracles are never seen.
Steve Lawrence
#43. 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
#44. You're like the portrait," he says. "A vision of erotic beauty. But a portrait isn't flesh, and its beauty can't feel pleasure.
J. Kenner
#45. Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.
Henry James
#46. I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.
In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait
Pablo Neruda
#47. Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality.
Burton Silverman
#48. 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
#49. Sometimes the picture someone else paints of us is a more accurate portrayal than a reflection. What we see in the mirror is always reversed. A portrait not only allows us to see our own faces, but how it looks to others.
Megan Hart
#50. A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
Robert Hughes
#51. It is for the artist ... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.
James Whistler
#52. When I paint a portrait I want to know more than just the looks of the person. I want to know how they live and what their feelings are ... It then becomes more than just physiognomy, but the feel of the person.
Jamie Wyeth
#53. Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints
Edith Sitwell
#54. THE FINAL TOUCH
Portrait of nobody in particular
Idiots are really
one hundred per cent
when they are also
intelligent.
Piet Hein
#55. I have a lifetime project which consists of boxes and boxes filled with envelopes on which people have written my name. I've always thought of it as a kind of double portrait, and a portrait of our relationship, which in some cases means nothing. But it makes me feel connected.
Micah Lexier
#56. There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.
Matthew Modine
#57. The image by Barry Blitt of Barack Obama and Michelle in the White House with him dressed as a terrorist, her dressed as an Angela Davis character, a flag burning in the chimney, a portrait of Bin Laden on the wall is an image I'm extremely proud of.
Francoise Mouly
#58. From a most kind suggestion put to me by Mr Farraday himself one afternoon almost a fortnight ago, when I had been dusting the portraits in the library. In fact, as I recall, I was up on the step-ladder dusting the portrait of Viscount Wetherby
Anonymous
#59. Blue eyes so light that it looked like she sent them out to be bleached
James Ellroy
#60. Marriage is sacred. It was created to be the wedding portrait of Christ and His Bride hung over the blazing fireplace of judgment. A match made in Heaven, a contract signed in blood. In the bond of marriage, we are to stand at the altar of Sacrifice or we're not to stand at all.
Beth Moore
#62. I'm very particular who I work with. I'm not interested in portraying women with a cliched, generic look. I'm interested in a model who I can take a portrait of.
Tim Walker
#64. When having my portrait painted I don't want justice, I want mercy.
Billy Hughes
#65. For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing.
Jon Bon Jovi
#66. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul.
Oscar Wilde
#67. Each person's work is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Johnson
#68. It's a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound.
Susanna Kaysen
#69. When I draw my caricature self-portrait, I always do a huge smile.
Rolf Harris
#70. When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage." and the portrait "in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty." p 349
Oscar Wilde
#71. If the face appears, the picture is inevitably a portrait and the expression of the face will dictate the viewer's response to the body.
Charis Wilson
#72. The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space - something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things ...
Daniel H. Pink
#73. For me, an aerial picture is no different than a close-up portrait. It's a question of framing and angle. Helicopters are great for that. But I've also used planes. Of course, I always have a harness.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
#74. What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
Charles Baudelaire
#75. I love going to galleries, particularly the National Portrait Gallery.
Mark Gatiss
#76. But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.
Jane Campion
#77. The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was in having a mind of her own at all.
Henry James
#78. Forgeries are an ever-changing portrait of human desires. Each society, each generation, fakes the things it covets most
Frank Wynne
#79. In some ways. it began when I heard her singing. Her voice twinning, mixing with my own. Her voice was like a portrait of her soul; wild as a fire, sharp as shattered glass, sweet and clean as clover
Patrick Rothfuss
#80. I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models ... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know ...
Francis Bacon
#81. 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
#82. Think as though the beauty of your life depends on your thoughts. Live as though your life is the portrait of your thoughts.
Debasish Mridha
#83. I see myself through others eyes and I am made anew.
Molly Moore
#84. Jarecki's 'Reagan' is a compellingly watchable and appropriately conflicted portrait ... artfully nuanced and intellectually curious.
Hank Stuever
#85. 'The Red' delivers intense action, leavened by a genuinely sympathetic portrait of soldiers caught up in battles they never chose.
Annalee Newitz
#86. Every time I want to impress someone about samples and hip-hop, I play 'Portrait of Tracy.' It's one of the greatest bass players ever doing a whole composition with only the two harmonics of electric bass; then a three-second loop in it became every great R&B song in five-year intervals.
Diplo
#87. 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
#89. For nearly two years, I was flying above the planet with my camera. I knew straight away that this was something important to do, just at this moment, a portrait of the planet for the millennium year. I worked in 80 countries, fighting for money all the time.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
#90. Richard Nixon as a 12-year-old was given a portrait of Lincoln that he hung over his bed. Nixon also justified what would later be seen as abuses of power by comparing America in the Vietnam era to the country during the Civil War.
Richard Norton Smith
#91. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
A.S. Byatt
#92. I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth.
John Shelby Spong
#93. NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time.
Vivian Swift
#94. By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.
Sigmar Polke
#95. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.
Oscar Wilde
#96. Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
Oliver Sacks
#97. The portrait of my parents is a complicated one,
but lovingly drawn.
Joyce Maynard
#99. My days are kind of controlled by my projects, so sometimes they're album covers. Sometimes they're commission portrait shoots. Sometimes they are editorial, so it kind of - I don't dictate it.
Carol Friedman
#100. Life is a series of family photos in which you keep moving to the rear until finally you're a portrait in the background.
Robert Breault
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