Quotes from Josef Albers

When we were in the seminary we got a stipend direct from the government and for that stipend we had an obligation to stick to our teaching job for five years.

There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and to formulations.

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it.

The role of art for me is the visualization of attitude, of the human attitude towards life, towards the world.

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

I have invented the Thermometer style.

You see, I have in my teaching - I always say I've done it for a hundred years and have had thousands of students - I have always spoken against just falling onto your knees for so-called accidents, I mean a result you are not responsible for.

I count all the time on resonance. I call on this, you see.

On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

A painter paints because he has no time not to paint.

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see.

As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.

I love very much to draw animals.

I was for years in the yellow period, you know.

Apprentice is the beginner - the first years you work in a craft in the European sense you are an apprentice. That takes 3 or 4 years. Then you are a journeyman. You can go from one master to another and learn other tricks and other secrets.

It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see.

I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.