Top 100 Richter's Quotes
#1. Majestic and stately as Conrad Richter's Awakening Land Trilogy, Evangeline is a big book from a big mind.
Katharine Weber
#2. Zaha Hadid's Maxxi Museum is proof that Rome and contemporary architecture are no longer a paradox. The building is characteristic Hadid - with curving lines and organic shapes - and the permanent collection already boasts works by Francesco Clemente, William Kentridge, and Gerhard Richter.
Amanda Hearst
#4. Talk about painting: there's no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important.
Gerhard Richter
#5. We've lost these qualities, these abilities to do something by hand. Some illustrators have it still, but it's just not art. We have photography. We have cameras and computers that do it better and faster.
Gerhard Richter
#6. I've always tried to be nice to people, so that sort of translates into popularity, I guess.
Andy Richter
#7. Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.
Gerhard Richter
#8. I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.
Gerhard Richter
#9. My ability to notice that kind of thing, the sanctity of the bubble that you create, has not been so good in a way, in that I notice it concurrently with actually doing the thing. I always notice it in retrospect.
Andy Richter
#10. One of the big tensions in my life is that I have known the stresses of financial hardship since I was a little kid, and it is the cancer for which I am seeking a cure.
Andy Richter
#11. If [you're asked] what you think, tell. If you have a preference, voice it. If you have a question, ask it. If you want to cry, bawl. If you need help, raise your hand and jump up and down.
Kristin Richter
#12. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of reflection.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#14. THE RICHTER SCALE, WHICH has technically been replaced by the "moment magnitude"1 scale, measures the energy released by an earthquake.
Randall Munroe
#15. Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.
Gerhard Richter
#16. The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.
Gerhard Richter
#17. If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.
Max Richter
#18. I wouldn't want to be a talk show host. That's another awkward compliment people make. 'You should have your own talk show.' And I think, no thank you.
Andy Richter
#19. A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#20. I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.
Gerhard Richter
#21. I mean, I'll say the filthiest things in the world, but when it comes down to it, I'm kind of a prude.
Andy Richter
#22. People won't stop painting, just as they won't stop making music or dancing. This is a facility we have. Children don't stop doing it or having it. On the other hand, it seems we don't need painting anymore. Culture is more interested in entertaining people.
Gerhard Richter
#23. Richter said, 'Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.'
Og Mandino
#24. I wanted to make it as anonymous as a photo. But it was perhaps also the wish for perfection, the unapproachable, which then means loss of immediacy. Something is missing then, though; that is why I gave that up.
Gerhard Richter
#25. Rough and dark is often the veil of the soul, while within, so pure and transparent. Like the grey crust upon ice, that, when severed, reveals within a pure blue light, like the transparent ether. Thus remain veiled to the stranger, but be not concealed from thyself.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#26. I have a sense of humor; but over the years that sense has developed one blind spot. I can no longer laugh at ignorance or stupidity. Those are our chief enemies, and it is dangerous to make fun of them.
Charles Francis Richter
#27. It's that same quality I've been talking about. It's neither contrived, nor surprising and smart, not baffling, not witty, not interesting, not cynical, it can't be planned and it probably can't even be described. It's just good.
Gerhard Richter
#28. I don't think I can do this - painting under observation. It's the worst thing there is, worse than being in the hospital.
Gerhard Richter
#29. Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.
Gerhard Richter
#30. What counts isn't being able to do a thing, it's seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.
Gerhard Richter
#31. I don't believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.
Gerhard Richter
#32. I think the people that are best at something, they don't think about it much. That's the whole key to being good at anything.
Andy Richter
#33. The flute is the true magical rod that changes all it touches in the inward world; an enchanter's wand at which the secret depths of the soul open. The inward world is the true world," said Vult; "the moonlight that shines into our hearts.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#34. I believe that you always have to believe. It's the only way; after all we both believe that we will do this exhibition. But I can't believe in God, as such, he's either too big or too small for me, and always incomprehensible, unbelievable.
Gerhard Richter
#35. Since she got a cause and stopped being funny. I think she's real funny, but lately it's all been hearts and flowers and tears and saving teenagers and creating a role model. And that ain't funny. No giggles there.
Andy Richter
#36. The smudging makes the paintings a bit more complete. When they're not blurred, so many details seem wrong, and the whole thing is wrong too. Then smudging can help make the painting invincible, surreal, more enigmatic - that's how easy it is.
Gerhard Richter
#37. The Atlas belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich - it's long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it's interesting because it looks different each time.
Gerhard Richter
#39. The thing that's important for me to focus on is the balancing of the tension between satisfying myself and satisfying an audience, and making something that I think is good and funny, worthwhile, small-"i" important, versus something that's going to do well.
Andy Richter
#40. But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
Andy Richter
#41. I believe in painting and I believe in eating too. What can we do? We have to eat, we have to paint, we have to live. Of course, there are different ways to survive. But it's my best option.
Gerhard Richter
#43. We've been swimming at nude beaches and I love to go skinny dipping, but I'm sorry, sitting on top of a mountain, that's just, you're trying to show off or something. That's ridiculous.
Andy Richter
#44. When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there's a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it.
Gerhard Richter
#45. I remember what Ron Greschner said when he retired. 'The thing I'm going to miss most is showering with 23 guys.' And that's what it's all about: camaraderie.
Mike Richter
#46. It's our culture, Christian history, that's what formed me. Even as an atheist, I believe. We're just built that way.
Gerhard Richter
#47. I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.
Gerhard Richter
#48. No one gave a crap that I was the kid from 'Free Willy'. You're not in some wispy fantasyland where everyone's telling you 'yes' all the time, which happens a lot to actors.
Jason James Richter
#49. Luce. We fight. I'm used to that. Sure, that fight was the scariest ass one we've ever had, but you're here now. That's all that matters. No matter how many fights we have, or how much they tip the Richter scale, none of it matters as long as at the end of the day, you're still with me.
Nicole Williams
#50. Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.
Jerry Saltz
#51. I never just sit down and see what's on TV anymore. And also, I hate almost everything, so that keeps you reading magazines and doing crossword puzzles or whatever.
Andy Richter
#53. My mother-in-law had to stop skipping for exercise. It registered seven on the Richter scale.
Les Dawson
#54. To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.
Gerhard Richter
#55. Dear Asshole: Thank you for keeping your word and believing me. It was more than I expected. Also, I'm sorry you were inconvenienced by my gluing your locker shut at the beginning of this year. However, I am not sorry that I did it, because it was a lot of fun. Love, Alex.
Francesca Zappia
#56. Violins sang, brass crowed, while bassoons, she felt, rumbled according to a Richter scale all of their own. Charlie
Alexander McCall Smith
#57. Would a watermelon in the midst of a chase sequence not be, in its own organic way, emblematic of our entire misunderstood enterprise? At once totally logical and perfectly irrational?
W. D. Richter
#58. Getting enough energy to satisfy the needs of the developing world without bringing on an eco-disaster is not going to be easy. It will require a marriage of science and technology with good international policy, something that is always hard to bring off. We need to get it right this time.
Burton Richter
#59. I have no motif, only motivation. I believe that motivation is the real thing, the natural thing, and that the motif is old-fashioned, even reactionary (as stupid as the question about the meaning of life)
Gerhard Richter
#60. A father draws boundaries and calls a halt, whenever necessary. As I didn't have that, I was able to stay childishly naive that much longer - so I did what I liked, because there was nobody stopping me, even when I got it wrong.
Gerhard Richter
#61. A man," answered Vult, "must have some chosen one, to whom, when he has involved all others in vapor and fog, he can open his breastplate, and the breast itself, and say, look in!
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#62. According to Democritus, truth lies at the bottom of a well, the water of which serves as a mirror in which objects may be reflected. I have heard, however, that some philosophers, in seeking for truth, to pay homage to her, have seen their own image and adored it instead.
Charles Francis Richter
#63. From here, it becomes an engineering problem; the engineer considers the ground motion that will occur and evaluates the requirements of the proposed structure in the light of the local foundation conditions.
Charles Francis Richter
#64. I've had kids come to me and say, 'Oh, I loved your movie when I was a kid, and I became a marine biologist.' It's crazy.
Jason James Richter
#65. The reason these paintings are destined for New York is not because I am disappointed about a lack of German interest, but because MoMA asked me, and because I consider it to be the best museum in the world.
Gerhard Richter
#66. I briefly considered doing Edgar Allan Poe and just swearing a lot.
Andy Richter
#67. I think you're an improvement on my imagination," I said, flipping back through the pages.
"You, too," he said. "My imagination - well, what little imagination I have - doesn't quite live up to the real thing."
"Agreed," I said. "The real thing is much better.
Francesca Zappia
#68. While a lab Director can get done the things that he regards as important, he has the more important job of bringing out the best ideas of the broader scientific community.
Burton Richter
#69. On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
#70. Emphasis was usually put on the horizontal acceleration factor, for the simple reason that ordinary structures have a built-in safety factor for the vertical component; that is, gravity.
Charles Francis Richter
#71. Without form, communication stops ... without form, you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one else can understand and - rightly - no one else is interested in.
Gerhard Richter
#72. Starving the future to feed the present is a mistake - it leads to obsolescence and stagnation. Sometimes it is hard to make this understood.
Burton Richter
#73. Look at her," said a pert little dinoflagellate with a perfectly smooth protein coat. "Look at her with her nose up in the air, refusing to divide.
Stacey Richter
#74. Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.
Gerhard Richter
#75. A truly great piano is one that enables you to convey deep emotion
Sviatoslav Richter
#76. Death is sad, but to those closest to the deceased it is greater than that, it is a catastrophe, an off-the-Richter-scale, ground-shaking earthquake, a gale force fuck hurricane, a three-story-high rolling tsunami that knocks you flat, sweeps you away and strips you bare.
Anonymous
#78. I repeatedly have to correct this belief. In a sense, magnitude involves steps of 10 because every increase of one magnitude represents a tenfold amplification of the ground motion. But there is no 'scale of 10' in the sense of an upper limit.
Charles Francis Richter
#79. If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.
Gerhard Richter
#80. As liberals, men like Richter viewed socialism as the great modern counter-revolution, and believed that the achievement of the socialist goal would lead both to appalling poverty and state absolutism. There was nothing in the socialist doctrine of the time that would suggest otherwise.
Ralph Raico
#83. The basic equation that mystified me as a young man was looking at guys who could actually get girls. I was always amazed, because they never seemed to care. I was like, 'How do they do that?'
Andy Richter
#84. My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term 'magnitude', which is used for the brightness of a star.
Charles Francis Richter
#85. I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.
Gerhard Richter
#86. I have painted my family so frequently because they are the one who really affect me the most.
Gerhard Richter
#87. Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself.
Gerhard Richter
#88. So we can simulate Richter-10 earthquakes. We simulate 70-foot waves coming into these things. Very cool. We basically say no human should ever be required to do anything, because if you judge by Chernobyl and Fukushima, the human element is not on your side.
Bill Gates
#89. I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.
Gerhard Richter
#90. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.
Gerhard Richter
#91. Every author knows what a stimulus it is to have an understanding publisher.
Gisela Richter
#92. Gray is the color ... the most important of all ... absent of opinion, nothing, neither/nor.
Gerhard Richter
#93. The paint for the grey paintings was mixed beforehand and then applied with different implements - sometimes a roller, sometimes a brush. It was only after painting them that I sometimes felt that the grey was not yet satisfactory and that another layer of paint was needed.
Gerhard Richter
#94. What would Chess be without silly mistakes?
Kurt Richter
#95. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.
Gerhard Richter
#96. A man's real possession is his memory; in nothing else is he rich; in nothing else is he poor." Richter has said: "Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven away. Grant but memory to us, and we can lose nothing by death.
William Walker Atkinson
#97. No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!
Andy Richter
#98. If somebody's looking at pictures of naked people and you go, 'Oh I don't want to see that,' you're lying. Cause naked people are always interesting. Always. Whether they're beautiful, or naked or 500 pounds.
Andy Richter
#99. I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things.
Gerhard Richter
#100. Look at it this way: if winning wasn't so hard, it wouldn't feel so good.
Mike Richter
