47 Quotes by Gutzon Borglum

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

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.

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

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

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.

Man's soul is strengthened by suffering.

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.

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.

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