M. C. Escher Quotes

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.

Science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the boderline between the two respective domains.

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

Order is repetition of units. Chaos is multiplicity without rhythm.

I never got a pass mark in math ... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books.

It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say.

My work is a game, a very serious game.

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

Hands, are the most honest part of the human body, they cannot lie as laughing eyes and the mouth can.

Originality is merely an illusion.

I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

Wonder is the salt of the earth.

What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.

I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days.

Although I am even now still a layman in the area of mathematics, and although I lack theoretical knowledge, the mathematicians, and in particular the crystallographers, have had considerable influence on my work of the last twenty years. The laws of the phenomena around us--order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals--have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.

I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity.

Drawing is deception.

Simplicity and order are, if not the principal, then certainly the most important guidelines for human beings in general.

So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen.

I might be in the basement. I'll go upstairs and check.

I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

I am myself: a light. In me you find your fate. So be not blind to the truth shining from my glow.