Zeisel Eva Quotes

#1. I made the things particularly because I wanted them to see the world.

Eva Zeisel

#2. My work is very bodily. It's not a shell, but a body.

Eva Zeisel

#3. My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists.

Eva Zeisel

#4. That's when I first learned about true frustration, that wrenching ache when the thing that matters most to you barely makes a ripple in other people's lives.

Robin Benway

#5. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.

James Joyce

#6. I think with my hands. I design things to be touched-not for a museum. A piece is ready when it has the shape of something to cherish.

Eva Zeisel

#7. My designs are meant to attract the hand as well as the eye.

Eva Zeisel

#8. I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.

Eva Zeisel

#9. A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

Will Durant

#10. You don't bother to memorise the literature - you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.

John Brunner

#11. Every crowd has a silver lining.

P.T. Barnum

#12. I don't know the difference between working and not working.

Eva Zeisel

#13. The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.

Sigmund Freud

#14. I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind.

Eva Zeisel

#15. The playful search for beauty.

Eva Zeisel

#16. If you think of beautiful things, you're not sad.

Eva Zeisel

#17. What is that in his hand?"
"A cleaver. As in-"
"Butcher's knife."
"You got it."
"I hope not."
"He does not look happy."
"Are you sure it's a he?"
"I don't want to know.

Ridley Pearson

#18. When Hitler came to power I was in the bath.

Anna Funder

#19. When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.

Eva Zeisel

#20. I don't know what my expectations are. It's like the word 'potential.' Those two words don't mean a whole lot to me. We can't please everybody. Certainly, we have to please ourselves first.

Jimy Williams

#21. When I met my designs in the market of a remote village in the West Indies, or in the airport restaurant in Zurich, I felt like the mother of many well-behaved children.

Eva Zeisel

#22. I am a maker of useful things.

Eva Zeisel

#23. I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

Eva Zeisel

#24. Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

Eva Zeisel

#25. When I design something, I think of it as a gift to somebody else.

Eva Zeisel

#26. Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.

Eva Zeisel

#27. Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.

Eva Zeisel

#28. Beautiful things make people happy.

Eva Zeisel

#29. Art has more ego to it than what I do.

Eva Zeisel

#30. If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas ...

Eva Zeisel

#31. The designer must understand that form does not follow function nor does form follow a production process. For every use and for every production process there are innumerable equally attractive solutions.

Eva Zeisel

#32. If I hadn't been a designer, I'd have been a painter. I began as a painter and learned the craft of pottery in order to support myself.

Eva Zeisel