Zeisel 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. I married a woman from New Orleans, so I had family here. Post-Katrina, I had a number of friends call me up and say they wanted to do something to help the community - not just Habitat for Humanity or Red Cross, we've done that, but what can we do for the community.

James Coulter

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Eva Zeisel

#7. 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

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

Eva Zeisel

#9. You can achieve anything you want in life if you have the courage to dream it, the intelligence to make a realistic plan, and the will to see the plan through to the end.

Sidney Friedman

#10. Stories that are good is deserving for a higher ranking

William Shakespeare

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

Eva Zeisel

#12. Certainly, the wealth of the rich is a consequence of the poverty of the poor. (Lori Altmann, p. 85)

Mev Puleo

#13. The playful search for beauty.

Eva Zeisel

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

Eva Zeisel

#15. It's delicious to have people adore you, but it's exhausting, too. Particularly when your own feelings don't match theirs.

Tasha Alexander

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

Eva Zeisel

#17. 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

#18. I am a maker of useful things.

Eva Zeisel

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Eva Zeisel

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

Eva Zeisel

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

Eva Zeisel

#24. Beautiful things make people happy.

Eva Zeisel

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

Eva Zeisel

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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