Eva Zeisel famous quotes

03-28-2025

The pleasure of making things beautiful or useful involves your feelings as well as your thinking. When your original sketch evolves into a tangible, three-dimensional object, your heart is anxiously following the process of your work. And the love involved in making it is conveyed to those for whom you made it.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Beautiful #Heart #Thinking
The playful search for beauty.
-- Eva Zeisel
Beautiful things make people happy.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Beautiful #People #Making People Happy
I am a maker of useful things.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Makers #Useful Things
I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Be Kind #Grotesque #Shock
If I hadn't been a designer, I'd have been a painter. I began as a painter and learned the craft of pottery in order to support myself.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Order #Support #Pottery
My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Party #Artist #People
My work is very bodily. It's not a shell, but a body.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Shells #Body
I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Want #Novelty #Designer
I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Mother #Cousin #Brother
The designer must understand that form does not follow function nor does form follow a production process. For every use and for every production process there are innumerable equally attractive solutions.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Doe #Use #Designer
When I met my designs in the market of a remote village in the West Indies, or in the airport restaurant in Zurich, I felt like the mother of many well-behaved children.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Mother #Children #Airports
Art has more ego to it than what I do.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Art #Ego
Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Home #Men #Design
Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Novelty #Aesthetic #Commerce
I made the things particularly because I wanted them to see the world.
-- Eva Zeisel

#World #Made #Wanted
If you think of beautiful things, youâ€™re not sad.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Beautiful #Thinking #Beautiful Things
To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means â€˜not like thisâ€™ and â€˜not like that.â€™ And the â€˜not likeâ€™â€”thatâ€™s why postmodernism, with the prefix of â€˜post,â€™ couldnâ€™t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Mean #Creative #Negative
When you begin your work, nothing exists. When it is finished it looks as if it just happened, spontaneously, effortlessly, convincingly. It looks as though it had been there all along.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Looks
When I design something, I think of it as a gift to somebody else.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Thinking #Design
My designs are meant to attract the hand as well as the eye.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Eye #Hands #Design
I don't know the difference between working and not working.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Differences
When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Hands #Bird #Clay
Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, Â plaster or clay.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Hands #Clay #Woods
Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.
-- Eva Zeisel

#Vocabulary #Curves #Design

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