Goldsworthy Quotes

#1. It's like the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy, or anyone who delights in anything ephemeral. The charm in a bottle of wine, the craft, all the work that goes into it . . . actually delighting in the fact that it's perishable and goes away I find really helpful. I've gotten a lot of miles out of a beautiful bottle of wine, not just for the taste and the buzz, but the symbolism of delighting in something that goes away. #Quote by Timothy Ferriss

#2. The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#3. That something is not impossible does not mean that it happened. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#4. Time confined into blind caves or extended through tunnels, responds to the call of infinity, which teases with its promise of freedom. outside the body, time is a pair of compasses in the hands of eternity, but inside it is a pendulum, fastened to the heart. the heart takes its measure from the lengthening swing of the pendulum surveying what time is left. in its own rhythm time spreads itself wildly here and there and is crippled elsewhere. its unequally distributed weight wounds my body - that is how the particularities of my life are manifest. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#5. The things that I make are that which a person will make. They're not meant to mimic nature. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#6. By pagans the Jews (and later Christians) were seen as perverse, almost indeed as atheists, for they denied the very existence of other gods. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#7. Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#8. A constant flickering confetti of butterflies showered the town of Darwin. Designer insects, I think of them now: there was something enormously wasteful, extravagant even, about the profusion of patterns and shapes and brilliant colours. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#9. The Gospel presents us with the righteousness of Jesus Christ, who, in his earthly life, perfectly interpreted the word of his Father. In so doing he justified the fallible attempts of his people to interpret the word. The justification of our hermeneutics by the perfect hermeneutics of Christ is the motivation for us to strive for hermeneutical sanctification. #Quote by Graeme Goldsworthy

#10. I think that I'm always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#11. I'm dealing with the most important things there are: life and nature. If this doesn't work, if this doesn't sustain me, I can't go back to nature. I'm right there. There's nowhere to go, and that frightens me. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#12. There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#13. Julia. At the most basic level a Roman husband had only to utter the phrase 'take your things for yourself' (tuas res tibi habeto) to separate from his wife. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#14. Some may object that to speak of election or predestination is to limit the kingdom of God to a few. Does it make God a capricious tyrant? We must answer that such objections usually stem from a refusal to accept that we are faced here with a mystery that is not given to us to solve. There is also a radical misunderstanding which maintains that God's sovereignty in election removes man's responsibility. Such is not true. How divine sovereignty and human responsibility work together we cannot know. The Bible makes it clear that they do. // Let us remember that Jesus discriminated and limited the numbers of the saved: 'Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it' (Matthew 7:13-14). This is in line with the Old Testament teaching that only a faithful remnant of Israel would be saved. #Quote by Graeme Goldsworthy

#15. My work comes first, reasons for it follow. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#16. Personal hatreds and rivalry loomed larger in most senator's minds than the good of the Republic. [A big problem then and now] #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#17. We leave our presence in the pavement. We're walking over it, sitting on steps. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#18. Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#19. The stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#20. You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#21. My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#22. Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#23. At home, my mother dabbed at her brow with a wet flannel she kept in the fridge for that purpose. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#24. When it does get below freezing and there is - it's cold enough for ice to form, then that changes the whole landscape, and it makes the landscape a different landscape to the one that I worked with previously. And I want to understand that. But the big tension of the ice works is that they're often made when it's cold enough to freeze one piece of ice to another. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#25. Nature, for me is raw and dangerous and difficult and beautiful and unnerving. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#26. I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#27. When I'm working with materials it's not just the leaf or the stone, it's the processes that are behind them that are important. That's what I'm trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#28. When I do the permanent projects or the big projects, when a work is finished, that's the beginning of its life. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#29. My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#30. The Ptolemies were Macedonians, with an admixture of a little Greek and via marriage with the Seleucids a small element of Syrian blood…Cleopatra may have had black, brown, blonde, or even red hair, and her eyes could have been brown, grey, green or blue. Almost any combination of these is possible. Similarly, she may have been very light skinned or had a darker more Mediterranean complexion. Fairer skin is probably marginally more likely given her ancestry. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#31. I tell you a secret about Chopin, piano is his best friend. More. He tells piano all his secrets." - piano teacher Eleanora Sivan. #Quote by Anna Goldsworthy

#32. I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#33. When I was at art school, a lot of art education is about art being a means of self-expression, and as an 18-year-old I didn't know if I had a huge amount I wanted to express. It was a big moment when I decided I wanted to shift the emphasis or the intention of my art from something I disgorged myself upon and something that actually fed me or made me see the world or understand the world. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#34. Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#35. I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#36. We must know when to move on. To search too long for perfection can also paralyse. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#37. Duco was gripping the top of the barricade tightly, staring at the departing leader. 'That was a curse.'
'From a man who eats people?' the Batavian with the broken nose said. 'Piss on him, what does he know. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#38. I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#39. I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#40. Even the stars we see
are only a kind of memory,
already dead for years. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#41. The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#42. Can I know that mine was a foolish, innocent world, a world of delusion and feeling and ridiculous dreams - a world of music - and still love it?

Endlessly, effortlessly. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#43. Caesar declared that an orator should `avoid an unusual word as the helmsman of a ship avoided a reef'. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#44. The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#45. Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#46. It's just that when I work on someone else's land, it makes me aware of the social nature of that landscape. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#47. Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#48. Sometimes you need to stop doing something to really see it afresh. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#49. Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#50. Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change. And in the case of some sculptures, time gives a patina to them. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#51. People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#52. I never hear you practice."
He smiled: "Only those who are dirty need to wash. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#53. Roman laws tended to be long and complex - one of Rome's most enduring legacies to the world is cumbersome and tortuous legal prose. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#54. My affection for you does not depend on those small things.'
Affection? To hear him admit it, to actually utter words of love, however understated, astonished me. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#55. I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#56. Quite openly, voters selected on the basis of perceived character and past behaviour rather than the views a candidate expressed. Where an individual's nature was not obvious, the Roman people tended to be drawn to a famous name, for there was a sense that virtue and ability were inherited. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#57. I did tests on small stones before collecting and committing myself to the larger ones. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#58. Sovereignty means exercising kingly power. We use the word in relation to God meaning that there is absolutely nothing that he does not control. #Quote by Graeme Goldsworthy

#59. (Sulla gave the slave his freedom and then had the man thrown to his death #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#60. Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather
rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm
is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#61. It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#62. For what is the life of a man, if it is not interwoven with the life of former generations by as sense of history. [Cicero, quoted by Goldsworthy in his Augustus] #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#63. The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#64. The first stone was just tried in the spirit of experimentation. The opening of the stone was far more interesting than the drawing that I had done on it. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#65. Art is not a career - it's a life. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#66. If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#67. If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#68. The gospel is saying that, what man cannot do in order to be accepted with God, this God Himself has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ. To be acceptable to God we must present to God a life of perfect and unceasing obedience to his will. The gospel declares that Jesus has done this for us. For God to be righteous he must deal with our sin. This also he has done for us in Jesus. The holy law of God was lived out perfectly for us by Christ, and its penalty was paid perfectly for us by Christ. The living and dying of Christ for us, and this alone is the basis of our acceptance with God #Quote by Graeme Goldsworthy

#69. The British climate, although it is very wet, it is quite mild in winter. We don't get these severe - generally don't get severe winters. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#70. Proverbs, and the wisdom literature in general, counter the idea that being spiritual means handing all decisions over to the leading of the Lord. The opposite is true. Proverbs reveals that God does not make all people's decisions for them, but rather expects them to use his gift of reason to interpret the circumstances and events of life within the framework of revelation that he has given. Yet when they have exercised their responsibility in decision-making, they can look back and see that the sovereign God has guided. #Quote by Graeme Goldsworthy

#71. The strength of Ray Ortlund's study of Proverbs is its Christ-centeredness. The wisdom of Proverbs loses none of its practical value, but rather is given its ultimate fulfillment as an expression of the wisdom of Christ. #Quote by Graeme Goldsworthy

#72. I smiled, but internally, unseen, using no visible facial muscles. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#73. At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient - only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#74. At Rome there were nothing even vaguely resembling modern political parties - although given the stifling impact of these, this may well have made it more rather than less democratic than many countries today - and each candidate for office competed as an individual. Only rarely did they advocate specific policies, although commenting on issues of current importance was more common. In the main voters looked more for a capable individual who once elected could do whatever the State required. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#75. The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#76. The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#77. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#78. My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays-integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#79. For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#80. Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#81. I could set from memory a replica of the perfect Still Life she laid out on the table each morning: the carefully folded Advertiser, the two canary yellow hemispheres of grapefruit in their bowls, separated by a more richly yellowed cube of butter; the sky blue milk-jug and matching sugar bowl filled to the brim with their differently textured whitenesses; the pot of tea snug in its knitted navy blue cosy, the steam that rose invisibly from its spout suddenly rendered visible, swirling, where it entered the slanting morning light. #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#82. I think I have been fashioned by the fickle weather of Britain that it is - it's forever changing. There's no kind of constant sun or dry weather or freezing weather, and I'm always having to change and adapt to that. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#83. People also leave presence in a place even when they are no longer there. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#84. Fire is the origin of stone. By working the stone with heat, I am returning it to its source. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#85. There are occasions when I have moved boulders, but I'm reluctant to, especially ones that have been rooted in a place for many years. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#86. Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#87. I have six acres in front of my own house, which I very rarely work on. Most of the work occurs on farmers' fields around me. And I like the discipline of working on other people's land. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#88. It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#89. Design implies a sense of mapping something out and then you follow the plan. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#90. The story of the fifth century was one of the exploitation of imperial weakness. Thus the Western Empire died. #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#91. Three or four stones in one firing will all react differently. I try to achieve a balance between those that haven't progressed enough and those about to go too far. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#92. If I had to describe my work in one word, that word would be time. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#93. The main source of my income is through the commissions of the large-scale works and big sculptures, the projects. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#94. I take the opportunity each day offers. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#95. There's a huge number of things that are occurring with the ice works which fascinate me enormously, but it's driven by this kind of frantic race against time. And whilst that creates a huge amount of tension and problems, it's a tension that I think I feed off. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#96. A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#97. If I'm going to understand the land, I have to understand the wind, the snow, the rain, the leaves, the ice, and changes in temperature. It just reflects a reality for me. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#98. Only the second-rate never make mistakes #Quote by Peter Goldsworthy

#99. Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#100. Complete control can be the death of a work. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#101. As Cicero would later declare, `For what is the life of a man, if it is not interwoven with the life of former generations by a sense of history?"3 #Quote by Adrian Goldsworthy

#102. I've laid down in dried up streambeds, leaving a shadow. And then, five minutes later, it's flash flooded, and where I once laid is now running water, which would've washed me away, you know? There's that power and danger often in places that look so calm and pastoral to begin with. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#103. It's art that's taught me to think and to write. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

#104. Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures. #Quote by Andy Goldsworthy