Marsden Hartley Quotes

I see the possibility of being 'made new' again and the gift of rebirth is all that lets anyone really live.. ..The great secret.. .. is never to get stuck, imprisoned in common social patterns. They always paralyse the real quality of life - the 'going onward' is all that matters, and the dead moments in one's life through trying to be a unit in any society or social concept are terrifying really.

It is never difficult to see images – when the principle of the image is embedded in the soul.

A reaction, to be pleasant, must be simple.

My work embodies little visions of the great intangible. ... Some will say he's gone mad - others will look and say he's looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him.

I have come to the conclusion that it is better to have two colors in right relation to each other than to have a vast confusion of emotional exuberance. . . I had rather be intellectually right than emotionally exuberant.

All things that are living are expression and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is.

I harp always on the 'idea' of life as I dwell perpetually on the existence of the moment.

The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion.. ..the idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal - a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth - a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere.

My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.

I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn MT - exceeding all my expectations so far that I am sort of helpless with words. I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn.

I don't want to escape via intellectual ruses – I want affirmations via passionate embraces & you can't have life unless you live it.

By getting as close to the true idea of religion, of spirituality as it is possible for us to get.. ...we would be in possession of the only tangible relationship tot the deity in things.

I could never be French, I could never become German - I shall always remain American - the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes.

My work is getting stronger & stronger and more intense all the time.... I have such a rush of new energy & notions coming into my head, over my horizon like chariots of fire that all I want is freedom to step aside and execute them.

Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (where Paul Cézanne worked a lot, fh) or from Venice to Toledo (where El Greco painted a lot, fh). Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself - that is the concern of the individualist.

The virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages.

They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience.

It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation.. ... My work requires it - but I myself have no need or use for it - Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative - I think all chrysalides do - all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion -resurrection - the establishment of the entity. But now I've come up tot the outside of my casements.

The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world -- it is like operetta in prose -- all so flowery and heavenlike.

(I was) happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.. ...rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.

the place (Dogtown, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, fh) is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone.. (it) looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge - essentially druidic in it appearance, it gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any moment and renew an ageless rite there.