Louise Berliawsky Nevelson Quotes

True strength is delicate.

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.

When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.

No matter how individual we humans are, we are a composite of everything we are aware of. We are a mirror of our times.

I'm a work horse. I like to work. I always did. I think that there is such a thing as energy, creation overflowing. And I always felt that I have this great energy and it was bound to sort of burst at the seams, so that my work automatically took its place with a mind like mine. I've never had a day when I didn't want to work. I've never had a day like that. And I knew that a day I took away from the work did not make me too happy. I just feel that I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working. ... In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall.

In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line… From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.

Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of an innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise. ... Each piece seems to have a life of its own. Every little piece or every big piece that I make becomes a very living thing to me, very living. I could make a million pieces; the next piece gives me a whole new thing. It is a new center. Life is total at that particular time. And that's why it's right. That reaffirms my life.

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

It gave me great pleasure to think that I could take wood, make it good, and make people like Rockefeller buy it with paper money.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

Most of us have to be transplanted before we blossom.

And I saw darkness for weeks. It never dawned on me that I could come out of it, but you heal. Nature heals you, and you do come out of it. All of a sudden I saw a crack of light ... then all of a sudden I saw another crack of light. Then I saw forms in the light. And I recognized that there was no darkness, that in darkness there'll always be light.

I see no reason why I should tickle stones or waste time on polishing bronze.

I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.

I think all great innovations are built on rejections.

A whisper can be stronger, as an atom is stronger, than a whole mountain.

It's a hell of a thing to be born, and if you're born you're at least entitled to your own self.

A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school.

I've taught, and the first thing I did when I taught art, was not to teach art.

I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working.

A woman may not hit a ball stronger than a man, but it is different. I prize that difference.

If you have got a living force and you're not using it, nature kicks you back. The blood boils just like you put it in a pot.

I feel totally female. I didn't compete with men and I don't want to look like a man! I love being a lady and dressing up and masquerading and wearing all the fineries. I'm breaking down the idea that the artist has to look poor, with berets.

You know when I decided to become professional - that means to expose yourself naked to the world with the other creative minds - I said, 'I'm going into areas I don't know. I might just fall right down to hell and kill myself.

The outside wold pressures you into a mold, but if you don't accept that - you gamble with life. Call it gambling.

I was discouraged about life, discouraged about people being blind, but I don't think I had a day that I ever questioned creativity. There has never been a day like that.

I never feel age... If you have creative work you don't have age or time.

We must create our own world.

The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved.

I believe in my work and in the joy of it. You have to be with the work and the work has to be with you. It absorbs you totally and you absorb it totally.

Greatness breaks laws.

I think people should think a million times before they give birth. The guilts of motherhood were the worst guilts in the world for me. They were really insurmountable. You see, you are depriving another human being of so many things, and the other party also knows it.

My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.

In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall. That's the only place where everything is all right.

I think that in the sexual act, as delightful as it can be, the very physical part of it is, yes, a hammering away. So it has a certain brutality.

[Good taste] is a nineteenth-century concept. And good taste has never really been defined. The effort of projecting 'good taste' is so studied that it offends me. No, I prefer to negate that. We have to put a period to so-called good taste.

When you are doing a piece you are with it. You don't want to wait until next week, when experience will have given you something else.

What we start with is a conviction to fulfill our being. Horses, trees fulfill themselves. Why shouldn't people.

It is as hard to take success as it is failure.

Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise.

If they blow it [the world] up, that's not my business. My business is to work.

I knew that a day I took away from the work did not make me too happy.

I began to stack my sculptures into an environment. It was natural. It was a flowing of energy.

I feel that women 'and men,' but I mean the 'individual,' can be totally feminine and still be totally powerful.

Everytime I put on clothes, I’m creating a picture.

I don’t demand that all work be a masterpiece. What I am doing is the right thing for me - that is what I am and this is living. It reflects me and I reflect it.

I've been so lonely for long periods of my life that if a rat walked in I would have welcomed it.

I only know this - that you can’t give advice to an artist.

I was given the gifts of the artist, and the trouble that goes with them: So I have that blessing, and there was never a time thatI questioned it or doubted it.... For forty years, I wanted to jump out of windows.