Dogen Zenji Quotes

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

One does not photograph something simply for 'what it is', but 'for what else it is.

Art is a mediator of the unspeakable.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.

Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose Upon Truths lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - just paint Spring.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!

What is art? Nature concentrated.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Art is more engaging that propaganda.