Famous M.C. Escher Quotes

The regular division of the plane into congruent figures evoking an association in the observer with a familiar natural object is one of these hobbies or problems...I have embarked on this geometric problem again and again over the years, trying to throw light on different aspects each time. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if this problem had never occurred to me; one might say that I am head over heels in love with it, and I still don't know why.

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

I play a tiresome game.

My work is a game, a very serious game.

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

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

I could fill an entire second life with working on my prints.

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

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

What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.
M. C. Escher, Quoted in Comic Sections, D. MacHale (Dublin 1993)

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.
M. C. Escher, Quoted in To Infinity and Beyond, E Maor (Princeton 1991)

A woman once rang me up and said, 'Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print -Reptiles- you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.' I replied, 'Madam, if that's the way you see it, so be it.'

I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me.

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 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.

Originality is merely an illusion.

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

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

At first I had no idea at all of the possibility of systematically building up my figures. I did not know ... this was possible for someone untrained in mathematics.

 I walk around in mysteries. Each time, youngsters say: you make Op-art too. I don't know what that is, Op-art. This work I have been making for the past thirty years.

There has to be a certain enigma in it, which does not immediately catch the eye.

I've been doing this kind of work for over fifty years now, and nothing in this strange and frightening world seems more pleasant to me.

Talent and all that are really for the most part just baloney. Any schoolboy with a little aptitude can perhaps draw better than I; but what he lacks in most cases is that tenacious desire to make it reality, that obstinate gnashing of teeth and saying, "Although I know it can't be done, I want to do it anyway.
Maurits Cornelius Escher, In Art

I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well.

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

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.