Giorgio Morandi Quotations

Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble.

A half dozen pictures would just about be enough for the life of an artist, for my life.

You cannot demonstrate your own greatness by remaining at one extreme, but by reaching out to both extremes at the same time, and filling the intermediate space.

What interests me the most is expressing what's in nature, in the visible world, that is.

Nothing is more abstract than reality.

I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

One can travel this world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.