All Quotes

“As to what I would like to be. It is difficult to say. An Artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts. People have always frightened and bored me, consequently I have been within my own shell and have not accomplished anything materially. Quote in Pollock's letter, Los Angeles (October 22, 1929) to Charles and Frank published in Jackson Pollock & Family (2011) American Letters: 1927”

“I believe easel painting to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is toward the wall picture or mural.. In his application for a grant given by the Guggenheim Foundation 1944; as quoted in Barbara Hess Abstract expressionism , Cologne: Taschen (2006), p. 9”

“It came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it. [1947, on his painting 'She wolf'] As quoted in David Anfam Abstract Expressionism , London: Thames and Hudson (1990), p. 87”

“Jackson Pollock: is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”

“When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a short of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well. In 'Possibilities', Vol. 1, no 1, winter 1947”

“Technic is the result of a need new needs demand new technics total control denial of the accident States of order organic intensity energy and motion made visible memories arrested in space, human needs and motives acceptance Quote around 1948”

“Pollock wrote this text on the back of a photo of himself taken in his own studio.”

“I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident.. Quoted in Ines Janet Engelmann Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner , Munich: Prestel Verlag (2007), p. 54”

“My work with Benton was important as something against which to react very strongly, later on; in this, it was better to have worked with him than with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less strong opposition. At the same time Benton introduced me to Renaissance art. [remark on his former art”

“I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end.. .Thus the fact that good European moderns [European artists who lived in the U.S. because of the Nazi”

“are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.”

“The Creative Process”

“As Much Truth As One Can Bear”

“The Cross of Redemption”

“Despair is a sin. I believe that. It is easy to be bleak about the human race, but there are people who have proved to me that we can be better than we are. Interview with M. S. Handler of the New York Times (3 June 1964), quoted in 'Demand For Presidential Lead On U.S. Race Issue', The Times (4 June 1963), p. 10”

“One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found”

“Doom and glory of knowing who you are”

“Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?”

“The American Dream and the American Negro”

“Negroes Are Anti”

“He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must have the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday's work, lest he fall into despair; nor to”

“And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance,”

“The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds. On a Dynamical Top, for exhibiting the phenomena of the motion of a system of invariable form about a fixed point, with some suggestions as to the Earth’s motion , read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh (20 April 1857); published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh , Vol. XXI, Part IV (1857).”

“The Man Who Paved the Way for Wireless,”

“The general equations are next applied to the case of a magnetic disturbance propagated through a non”

“I have also cleared the electromagnetic theory of light from all unwarrantable assumption, so that we may safely determine the velocity of light by measuring the attraction between bodies kept at a given difference of potential, the value of which is known in electromagnetic measure. Letter to C. Hockin, Esq. (Sept 7, 1864) as quoted by Lewis Campbell, William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell: With Selections from His Correspondence and Occasional Writings”

“I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns. Letter to C. H. Cay, (Jan 5,1865) as quoted in American Journal of Physics , 44(8), page 470, 1976”

“in a few years, all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and … the only occupation which will then be left to the men of science will be to carry these measurement to another place of decimals.”

“We may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion. Introductory Lecture on Experimental Physics held at Cambridge in October 1871, re”

“On Action at a Distance”