M.C. Escher > Quotes

“Only those who attempt the absurd...will achieve the impossible. I think ...I think it's in my basement...Let me go upstairs and check.”
― M.C. Escher

“Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?”
― M.C. Escher

“I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.”
― M.C. Escher

“We adore chaos because we love to produce order.”
― M.C. Escher

“What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.”
― M.C. Escher

“He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonderful.”
― M.C. Escher

“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.”
― M.C. Escher

“My work is a game, a very serious game.”
― M. C. Escher

“At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.”
― M.C. Escher

“Hands, are the most honest part of the human body, they cannot lie as laughing eyes and the mouth can.”
― M.C. Escher

“We do not know space. We do not see it, we do not hear it, we do not feel it. We are standing in the middle of it, we ourselves are part of it, but we know nothing about it.”
― M.C. Escher

“There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account. Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth's crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his stone tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed.”
― M.C. Escher, The World of M.C. Escher

“«It is impossible for the inhabitants of different worlds to walk or sit or stand on the same floor, because they have differing conceptions of what is horizontal and what is vertical. Yet they may well share the use of the same staircase. On the top staircase illustrated here, two people are moving side by side and in the same direction, and yet one of them is going downstairs and the other upstairs. Contact between them is out of the question because they live in different worlds and therefore can have no knowledge of each other's existence.»”
― M.C. Escher, M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work

“When the sea is calm, the landscape (seascape) seems simple and even monotonous, sometimes with a distant, sometimes with a close coastline, but usually with no land in sight at all. You feel 'free', not only free of care, but also free of the solidity of the earth's crust. It is a wonderful sensation, feeling the liquidity of the water under the ship. This salutary freedom is constantly present, on deck by day, in bed at nights. The movements of the ship vary from a gentle rocking to swinging and hurtling; you are never motionless while at sea. Then you start to observe and assimilate all these natural phenomena surrounding you: the infinite variety of the waves and the swell of the sea, and for the first time in ages you look again at the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars, and you see the living creatures in and over the sea, the fish and the birds.”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“I was peculiarly moved by the angelic life growing on the ground. I have no idea what sorts of flowers grow there in profusion -- I don’t know their names. But I was so moved that I sat down, trying to flatten as few grasses and plants as possible with my clumsy backside... This brought my head quite close to the silent, joyful, exuberant, celestial children of heaven. They are so humble, so quiet, and they do not mind if you observe them, if you think they are beautiful... Nor do they mind if you don’t look at all -- they just stand there together all by themselves in the huge stretch of woods and grow and bloom just the same, peacefully, joyfully, and silently. I am absolutely sure that they know nothing of the swinish and filthy behaviour of people in their dirty stinking houses -- they know only about heaven.”
― M.C. Escher, M.C. Escher: His Life and Complete Graphic Work. With a Fully Illustrated Catalogue

“I want to find happiness in the tiniest of things - a minute moss plant, 2 cm across, on a rock - and I want to try to do what I've been wanting to do for so long, that is, to copy these infinitesimally small things as precisely as possible and to be aware of their size.”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“Sometimes, just before I fall asleep at night, I have a beautiful vision. In my imagination I see the earth floating like an enormous orange, stately and still, in the pure emptiness surrounding her. I see her slowly rotating, always lit up and warmed on one side by her mother, the sun. Ribbons and shreds of cloud float around her, and between these the seas and the multi-coloured continents, with their humid plains and snowy mountaintops, sparkle and shimmer. And I see the hot, yellow deserts and the frozen polar icecaps.
I am so far removed from the beautiful earth that the people scurrying around in their cities are of course no longer visible. Whether this is such a good thing as it seems to be at the time is open to question. But it is a fact that my vision is so beautiful, so restful and so full of peace that I usually fall asleep soon afterwards.
That is why this also seems to be the right moment to end my story, at least for today,”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“I should like to end this description of the stars with the Pleiades, which I once saw rising up out of the sea. When and where in Holland is the atmosphere ever so free from dust and mist that you can see the stars clearly right down to the horizon? One evening I saw a point of light appearing on the horizon, followed a moment later by another one. I thought they were the lights of a ship sailing by in the distance. But then a third light appeared, and a fourth, and finally there were seven altogether; it was then that I recognised the Pleiades, making for the heavens in full sail, like a ghost ship.”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“Baarn, 5 July 1964: 'On the train to Utrecht I was suddenly overwhelmed and enormously moved by a sky full of clouds at different levels. I experienced a sense of space and three-dimensionality such as I'd not experienced for a long time. It's possible to suddenly become aware of these things, even in an overpopulated country like Holland. Provided that you are looking up, you'll suddenly see that timeless and unbounded eternity. Do you think it silly, or can you imagine what I mean?”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk

“Coxeter also wrote a long mathematical explanation in his letter, which was beyond Escher's comprehension, as he remarked in a letter to George and Corrie.

Baarn, 28 May 1960: 'I had an enthusiastic letter from Coexter about my coloured fish, which I sent him. Three pages of explanation of what I actually did... It's a pity that I understand nothing, absolutely nothing of it...”
― M.C. Escher, Leven en werk van M.C. Escher : het levensverhaal van de graficus : met een volledig geïllustreerde catalogus van zijn werk