Fernando Botero Quotes

“Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.”

“All my life, my girlfriends are always skinny. Beauty in art has nothing to do with beauty in reality. Why do you like primitive art? Because there is beauty in the deformity. Sometimes paintings that people consider realistic are not at all. Raphael figures look realistic, but in real life, they were deformed.”

“My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.”

“There's nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it's a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.”

“All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn’t be love letters if they were not Ridiculous.”

“Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?”

“Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice”

“Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...”

“Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!”

“To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above.”