Gutzon Borglum Quotes

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Gutzon Borglum

Profession : Sculptor

Birth : March 25, 1867

Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.

Gutzon Borglum

I am ready to rot in jail that art may live.

Gutzon Borglum

Art does not exist for itself; it is but an avenue through and by which humanity expresses itself.

Gutzon Borglum

That is how America gets her art: Contracting firms get the contract and the honor. Starving artists do the work. The government pays for sculpturing thousands of dollars, of which the sculptor gets a hundred or so.

Gutzon Borglum

You may go from the Battery to Harlem, and in our monuments and statues of public men you will see the slavish adherence to Greek and Roman ideals, from which our artists cannot get away.

Gutzon Borglum

There is none of that feeling about art that you meet everywhere in Europe. There you will hear people say, 'Oh, you must see such-and-such a statue at 4 o'clock in the afternoon; then the light is beautiful,' or, 'See this monument in the early morning; the light is best for it then.' Do you ever hear anything like that from an American?

Gutzon Borglum

American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.

Gutzon Borglum

There is art in everything - industry, education, play, all are forms of art.

Gutzon Borglum

Women have always been the world's burden bearers. Ever since history began the great burden of the world's faith, its belief in immortality has been carried in the arms of its women.

Gutzon Borglum

No man can ever repay the brooding mother love to which he his life.

Gutzon Borglum

Motherhood is heroism. It is God-given, and yet men treat women as though of similar common clay, when in fact they are but lower than the angels.

Gutzon Borglum

America has no monuments to ideas; her monuments are erected to individuals.

Gutzon Borglum

The Greeks, the Italians, and the Indians, from whom we get our ideas, erect monuments to ideas; we erect ours to men, and of such monuments we have an oversupply.

Gutzon Borglum

I have labored to make the record of the great men of my time.

Gutzon Borglum

A piece of sculpture has to be more than a block of wood.

Gutzon Borglum

Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.

Gutzon Borglum

I am ready to rot in jail for the rest of my life rather than admit that my small-minded enemies are right.

Gutzon Borglum

Stone Mountain Memorial is the greatest project of its sort ever conceived. It should be finished, because it represent an idea as deep, as basic as the rocks on which our wonderful continent rests.

Gutzon Borglum

Gutzon Borglum, the individual, is nothing. Art, expression, freedom are everything. On this I stand or fall.

Gutzon Borglum

Forget about getting a bank balance and don't be satisfied with things being good enough. Accept only that which is good or the best.

Gutzon Borglum