Patrick Bringley > Quotes

“Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real. That's all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine or feel fully the things you already know.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“A work of art tends to speak of things that are at once too large and too intimate to be summed up, and they speak of them by not speaking at all.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“I'm sometimes not sure which is the more remarkable: life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“So under the cover of no one hearing your thoughts, think brave thoughts, searching thoughts, painful thoughts, and maybe foolish thoughts, not to arrive at right answers but to better understand the human mind and heart as you put both to use.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“A mother at the American Wing fountain hands her child two coins: “One wish for yourself,” she says, “and another, just as big, for someone else.” I have never heard this before and immediately know I will say it to my children one day.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“I think that sometimes we need permission to stop and adore, and a work of art grants us that.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“On a typical day, it is easy to glance at strangers and forget the most fundamental things about them: that they’re just as real as you are; that they’ve triumphed and suffered; that like you they’re engaged in something (living) that is hard and rich and brief.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“It feels like the more I explore, the more I will see, the more I’ll understand how very little I’ve seen.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Art often derives from those moments when we wish the world to stand still.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that's there. We shouldn't think "This is good," or "This is bad," or "This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, Z." Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn't think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Too many think the objective is to learn about art rather than from it.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Michelangelo had only this to say: “I have finished the chapel I have been painting: the Pope is very well satisfied,” he wrote his father. Then he added: “Other things have not turned out for me as I’d hoped. For this I blame the times, which are very unfavorable to our art.” Today, we call those “unfavorable” times the High Renaissance.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“A graceful, broken body, it reminds us again of the obvious: that we’re mortal, that we suffer, that bravery in suffering is beautiful, that loss inspires love and lamentation. This part of the painting performs the work of sacred art, putting us in direct touch with something we know intimately yet remains beyond our comprehension.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real, is all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine more fully the things you already know.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“When we adore, we apprehend beauty. When we lament, we see the wisdom of the ancient adage “Life is suffering.” A great painting can look like a slab of sheer bedrock, a piece of reality too stark and direct and poignant for words.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can’t be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the “flash and sparkle” of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty that the old masters seldom could fit into their symbolic schemes, a beauty more chaotic and aflame than our tidying minds typically let us see.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“So many stories under the blue jacket," he says.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint—silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest. And I didn’t know what to make of that. It is always hard to know what to make of that.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“What might be excruciating if suffered for an hour or two is oddly easy to bear in large doses.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“This time, I arrive at the Met with no thought of moving forward. My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still awhile.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“It's hard to feel that all is well when you've just seen the swinging Picasso.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“The Met is a place where, with your own eyes, you can see what fellow fallible humans have made of the world that you live in.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Would you rather have a 100 percent chance nothing happens to your Stradivarius, or would you rather have music coming from your Stradivarius? You can’t have both.”
― Patrick Bringley

“In moments like these I realize how much sensory experience falls through the cracks between our words.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“I responded to that great painting in a way that I now believe is fundamental to the peculiar power of art. Namely, I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. I couldn’t discharge the feeling by talking about it—there was nothing much to say. What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint—silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest. And I didn’t know what to make of that. It is always hard to know what to make of that.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Religion contains the root word ligio, as in ligature. In its basic form, it is “a tying back,” a return of one’s focus to certain elementary truths as a community perceives them. I belong to no particular religious tradition,”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“God Damn it, I'm in the Jesus pictures again.” The most memorable complaint that I overhear in my early weeks comes when I'm patrolling the oldest of the Old Master corridors.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“Nobody has ever been so much themselves over a span of three thousand years as the ancient Egyptians,”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“We are in our late twenties and early thirties, an age when you stop showing off to your friends and begin to lean on them for support. It’s a tricky age. The apprentice stage of adulthood is ending, honest-to-God adulthood looms, and you have to figure out what to do with your life, again, and maybe this time for real.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me