Isamu Noguchi Quotes

It is weight that gives meaning to weightlessness.

You can find out how to do something and then do it or do something and then find out what you did.

Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.

When an artist stopped being a child, he would stop being an artist.

To order space is to give it meaning.

The attractions of ceramics lie partly in its contradictions. It is both difficult and easy, with an element beyond our control. It is both extremely fragile and durable. Like 'Sumi' ink painting, it does not lend itself to erasures and indecision.

We are a landscape of all we have seen.

Brancusi made me realize that what I had learned previously — the quick ways of doing things — was all wrong... It is not the quick solutions. It is not something you learn and apply. After all, it is a search you have to enter into yourself.

The best is that which is most spontaneous or seemingly so.

In my work, I wanted something irreducible, an absence of the gimmicky and clever.

I am always learning, always discovering.

For me it is the direct contact of artist to material which is original, and it is the earth and his contact to it which will free him of the artificiality of the present and his dependence on industrial products.

The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature.

Appreciate the moment.

It is said that stone is the affection of old men. That may be so. It is the most challenging to work. A dialogue ensues – of chance no chance, mistakes no mistakes. No erasing or reproduction is possible, at least in the way I work, leaving nature’s mark. It is unique and final.

Art should become as one with its surroundings.

The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence.

I perceive my limitations even as I work. There are times when I see nothing but restrictions, barriers. Learning takes time.

When the time came for me to work with larger spaces, I conceived them as gardens, not as sites with objects but as relationships to a whole.

I learned the tricks... If you want to do academic things, you can do them. It is not difficult. Yet it is from this difficulty - the mistakes and dead ends - that artists develop, not through the quick solutions and not from something you learn and apply.