Gutzon Borglum Quotes

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Gutzon Borglum

Profession : Sculptor

Birth : March 25, 1867

For many years I had been aware that women were not only most important creations in the universe, but the nearest approach that man could reach to the divine.

Gutzon Borglum

The aim of art is to understand and establish order, which is another form of beauty.

Gutzon Borglum

Art is not what most people think it to be. It is not an occupation of one-railed people.

Gutzon Borglum

Democracy has betrayed the race, because education has not served man as was expected.

Gutzon Borglum

A monument's dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated.

Gutzon Borglum

A city of homes should not be built as a business center.

Gutzon Borglum

I was born in the Golden West, reared in the arms of the Church, deluged with saints to draw from, and suckled on Italian art: my slates were covered from end to end with portraits of Savonarola, Fra Angelico, and Wild Bill and Sitting Bull; I knew all equally well and admired them about alike.

Gutzon Borglum

Mount Rushmore is eternal. It will stand until the end of time.

Gutzon Borglum

Genius knocks on the door and gets no answer but its own echo.

Gutzon Borglum

Beauty is like a soul that hovers over the surface of form. Its presence is unmistakable in art or in life.

Gutzon Borglum

There is something in sheer volume that awes and terrifies, lifts us out of ourselves.

Gutzon Borglum

Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.

Gutzon Borglum

I have a very unsatisfactory and incomplete knowledge of Brooklyn and cannot discuss specifically either what you can do here or what possibilities the city shows in an artistic way. I am not a foreigner but coming here as I do after a long stay abroad, I think things here strike me much as they strike a foreigner.

Gutzon Borglum

You have here In New York one of the greatest and most picturesque and artistic structures in the world. I mean the Brooklyn Bridge.

Gutzon Borglum

An artist will starve unless he is near big centers of population. We should create many of these cultural centers right in our own slums.

Gutzon Borglum

We have been concentrating on the banks, business and our bellies. We have neglected the spiritual and cultural. It was because Rome and Athens neglected these things that they fell.

Gutzon Borglum

Renaissance always comes out of depression.

Gutzon Borglum

Man's soul is strengthened by suffering.

Gutzon Borglum

I believe and find in my study of art that the real artist is nine-tenths of the time a craftsman, and it is only in that small one-tenth of the time that he rises to the elevated position of a prophet and a master.

Gutzon Borglum

Art in America should be American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement.

Gutzon Borglum