Cute, Modern And Inspirational Calligraphy Quotes

Many quotes look beautiful in calligraphy. These quotes are often pretty sentiments about love and life, written in gorgeous handwriting as a way of inspiring the reader.

Calligraphy is an ancient art that goes back to the Chinese. With many styles of handwriting, calligraphy has been brought into the twenty-first century. Taking the time to write a message by hand is something that has almost been lost in today’s fast-paced world.

These quotes will inspire you and lead you toward a calmer, more peaceful sense of self and a beautiful outlook on the world.

Calligraphy is a kind of music not for the ears, but for the eyes.

V. Lazursky

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Calligraphy is the most intimate, private and spontaneous expressive means. Like a fingerprint or voice it is unique with every person

Hermann Zapf

The calligraphy is found in those aspects of form that reveal the hand’s freedom, the gesture, the dance, the tool’s scraping and flowing, the intersection of mind and nature that occurs when hand and heart move as one. In short, the instantaneous character of the living mark is the calligraphy.

Steven Skaggs

The written is to be read and not to be misread.

Sultan-Ali Mashkhedi

I never did calligraphy… But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It’s part of the syndrome of modernism… It’s part of that asceticism.

Paul Rand

Lettering creates readable art that comes to life, displaying a quirky, whimsical nature.

Peggy Dean

Write one letter and wait for ages

Prof. R. K. Joshi

You will never see good letters coming from your hand until you have learned to see good letters in your head. Good work depends on clear mental images. Clear images are based on knowledge of the causes of the thing imagined. Knowledge comes from intelligent practice. When practice has given the artist a clear image of what he has to do, he has insight into his art.

Lawrence R. Brady

Letters act as practical and useful signs, but also as pure and inner melody.

Wassily Kandinsky

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Kaz’s art is a powerful example of discipline and freedom. His classical calligraphy captures the inner movement and stillness of the brush and mind.

Joan Halifax

For the largest part ill handwriting in the world is caused by hurry.

Lewis Carroll

A flourish is to be neat and glamorous and, at the same time, to be filled with motion, life energy, thought, and wit of the master.

H. Korger

Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but . . . also betrays his heart rate, his breathing.

Dai Sijie

Calligraphy is the ultimate synthesis of what I love: language, art and human connection.

Joy Deneen

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Just above our terror, the stars painted this story in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.

Aberjhani

… the problem before us is fairly simple–To make good letters and to arrange them well.

Edward Johnston

More powerful than all poetry, more pervasive than all science, more profound than all philosophy are the letters of the alphabet, twenty-six pillars of strength upon which our culture rests.

Anonymous

Calligraphy is an art form that uses ink and a brush to express the very souls of words on paper.

Kaoru Akagawa

If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.

Pablo Picasso

On pristine parchment I draw with my skis calligraphic lines of joy, writing poems of movement.

Patricia Robin Woodruff

Bad calligraphy comes from not understanding tool and form well enough to be free and clear in gesture. Bad calligraphy is making forms that are unsure, insecure, self-conscious, whereas good calligraphy unites the freedom of the hand with the mastery of tool and self in performance, whether letterforms be present or absent.

Steven Skaggs

In a painting, you can’t make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist’s stroke.

Vikram Seth

Calligraphy is the most direct form of all artistic expression. Just as each movement of the dancer is absolute, so every gesture of the calligrapher is essential. It is not the meaning of the character but the writing–the movement of execution and the action itself–that is important.

Tseng Yu-ho Ecke

The beauty of a letter depends on the harmonious adaptation of each of its parts to every other in a well-proportioned manner so that a whole shall satisfy our aesthetic sense. A result gained only by blending together the fine strokes, stems, and swells in their proper relations.

Frederick Goudy

Geometry can produce legible letters, but art alone makes them beautiful.

Paul Standard

The furthering of calligraphy in our own time above all serves self-realization by developing man’s creative talents. Calligraphy frees emotions and abilities which are hidden in the depths of personality. It activates the power of the soul.

Karlgeorg Hoefer

What joy there is in hearing yourself think, and to make that thinking into ink.

John Olsen, Australian Artist

The written letter is something personal, organic, unique and spontaneous. It mirrors the character and the personality of the writer, and often his mood of the moment.

Emil Ruder

Artistic Writing is so attractive and pleasing to the eye that it is never likely to lose its popularity. The skill displayed in its execution creates wonder and holds most people by its fascination.

F.W. Tamblyn

The letter beautiful is an ideal we are engaged in, and it is oftentimes our subject. As we will never be free of this, we must embrace it.

John Stevens

The making of letters in every form is for me the purest and the greatest pleasure, and at many stages of my life it was to me what a song is to the singer, a picture to the painter, a shout to the elated, ore a sign to the oppressed. It was and is for me the most happy and perfect expression of my life.

Rudolf Koch

Just as writing can become calligraphy when it’s creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement—the art of living.

H.E. Davey

The scribe strives for spontaneity, sometimes he sweats blood to make it look easy, for spontaneity is the life blood of calligraphy.

Ray Da Boll

A written letter is like a bowl filled with a certain content. The purer the content, the more delicate strings of the human soul it touches

L. Pronenko

Lettering is my music.

Peter Thornton

Marks come alive when they are made with a sense of confidence, engagement, an unselfconscious tap into the flow that is somehow beyond yet also within the calligrapher.

Steven Skaggs

The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing.

Shunryu Suzuki

Each letter in every script known to man holds an eternal power, an individual beauty in its vertical, horizontal, angular lines, in their continuity

Achyut Palav

Be faithful to precision, neat handwriting, and authorship.

Edward Johnston

For me, calligraphy is the physical revelation of the structure of the ideas; a reflection of the shape, texture and color of the phrases; and the integration of the words’ texture and color with their meanings.

Beth Lee

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy – the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand – and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

Robert Bringhurst

I look at lettering as a huge palette which includes calligraphy, type forms, and everything in between. The colours of that palette can be mixed into an infinite variety of blends.

Julian Waters

Every bottle of ink contains at least one good letter … and it’s at the bottom.

Peter Thornton

A good flourish is the mood and soul of an artist creating capricious and delicate beauty with a pen′ s nib

Yu. Greschuk

There are five virtues: accuracy, literacy, a strong hand, industriousness, and the perfect writing utensils.

Mir-Ali Khoravi

Perfection of handwriting needs proper education, regular exercises, and purity of the soul.

Yakut Mustasimi

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

H.G. Wells

The advantage of drawing letters is that we can incorporate nuance. Nuance, rather than slavish precision, is what breathes life into our letters.

Peter Thornton

Calligraphy is like crawling into a funnel from the wrong end: the farther you go, the more there is to learn and do. It is a never-ending source of pleasure.

Sheila Waters

Calligraphy is the most intimate, private, and spontaneous expressive means. Like a fingerprint or voice it is unique with every person.

German Zapf

The five excellences include: calligraphy, painting, poetry, medicine, and t’ai chi chuan.

Cheng Man-ch’ing

Despite the hard work and frustration, the striving for excellence is part of the fun of lettering.

Marsha Brady

The circle is a reminder that each moment is not just the present, but is inclusive of our gratitude to the past and our responsibility to the future.

Kazuaki Tanahashi

As you work with different teachers, you may note that the truly inspirational and great ones are not dogmatic about letterform, technique or methodology.

Tina Vickers

Addison spoke in calligraphy while everyone else talked in scribbles.

Shawn Martin

Regardless of how diligently a person practices penning the strokes and letters, their efforts will never lead to consistently superb results unless they can see the correct forms in their mind before their pen touches the paper. “The hand cannot conceive what the mind cannot perceive.”

Michael R. Sull

The man who works with his hands is a laborer. The man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman. The man who works with his hands, his brain, and his heart is an artist.

Louis Nizer

“Modern calligraphy” is the folk art class of script forms that is easy for someone to learn, compared with the more formal hands of calligraphy that take much time and effort to master. Modern calligraphy is a class of trendy scripts that are characterized by bounced and rounded lettering, which is closer to freestyle handwriting than historical calligraphy and its variations.
Steve Husting

To be concerned with the shape of letters is to work in an ancient and fundamental material.
William Addison Dwiggins

The qualities of letterforms at their best are the qualities of a classic time.
William Addison Dwiggins

Order, Simplicity, Grace. To try to learn and repeat their excellence is to put oneself under training in a most simple and severe school of design.
William Addison Dwiggins

The development of letters was a purely natural process in the course of which distinct and characteristic types were evolved and some knowledge of how these came into being will help us in understanding their anatomy and distinguishing good and bad forms.
Edward Johnston

Always introduce a bit of imperfection, because calligraphy is made by the human hand, not a machine, and human imperfections will always be more appealing to humans than perfection.
Ina Saltz

Do calligraphy which is more like your handwriting. Connect your letters in ways which no machine can do. This is the future of calligraphy.
Ina Saltz

There must be endless repetitions of every stroke in order to win exact beauty of execution. But the winning is sure. Failure means nothing — except the need for further practice. Perseverance in it assures nothing less than perfection at the last. “Practise” is the word of power.
Edward Summers Squier, M.A. (1919 book)

It should be the ambition of every penman to make his writing first clear, then graceful, and finally distinctive. It is in this last development that personality appears.
Edward Summers Squier, M.A. (1919 book)

Faithful practice will bring its own great reward — the possession of an accomplishment that should be earnestly desired by all, a handwriting at once clear and rapid, distinctive and beautiful.
Edward Summers Squier, M.A. (1919 book)

Ultimately, what gets written is not words, but feeling, or what is written into the words is feeling. The hand writes the heart.
Steven Skaggs

Bad calligraphy is making forms that are unsure, insecure, self-conscious, whereas good calligraphy unites the freedom of the hand with the mastery of tool and self in performance, whether letterforms be present or absent.
Steven Skaggs

It is only in revealing the moving hand that calligraphy becomes calligraphy. The accidental nicks in form caused by the paper fibers, the running and splashing of ink, the carefree and graceful swashing and buckling — these are the calligraphy. The calligraphy is found in those aspects of form that reveal the hand’s freedom, the gesture, the dance, the tool’s scraping and flowing, the intersection of mind and nature that occurs when hand and heart move as one. In short, the instantaneous character of the living mark is the calligraphy.
Steven Skaggs

Calligraphy has always existed in that place of tension between what the letterform desires: to be completely principled, and what the hand desires: infinite freedom of gesture.
Steven Skaggs

Calligraphy: Disciplined freedom is the essence of it.
Raymond DaBoll

Marks come alive when they are made with a sense of confidence, engagement, an unselfconscious tap into the flow that is somehow beyond yet also within the calligrapher. When that happens — and all of you know it when it happens — the calligrapher becomes an instrument; the egoistic wall between self and other dissolves; page, mind and world unite.
Steven Skaggs

Calligraphy is a beautiful art in continuous transformation, and therefore new eyes are always needed to interpret it with respect.
Ernesto Murrau

If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind’s eye and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
Twyla Tharp

All the other inspiration I need to design a calligraphy piece is found right in the text if I take the time to meditate on its meaning.
Timothy R. Botts

With each color and letter style, I enter into the meaning of the text. Words of gratitude are made with flourishes. Words of confession are lower case and sometimes made with my untrained hand to convey humility. Relationships are written with interwoven letters touching each other.
Timothy R. Botts

The process of visualizing the words causes the meaning to go straight to my heart.
Timothy R. Botts

Artistic Writing is so attractive and pleasing to the eye that it is never likely to lose its popularity. The skill displayed in its execution creates wonder and holds most people by its fascination.
F.W. Tamblyn

The calligraphy is found in those aspects of form that reveal the hand’s freedom, the gesture, the dance, the tool’s scraping and flowing, the intersection of mind and nature that occurs when hand and heart move as one. In short, the instantaneous character of the living mark is the calligraphy.
Steven Skaggs

Marks come alive when they are made with a sense of confidence, engagement, an unselfconscious tap into the flow that is somehow beyond yet also within the calligrapher.
Steven Skaggs

The advantage of drawing letters is that we can incorporate nuance. Nuance, rather than slavish precision, is what breathes life into our letters.
Peter Thornton

The man who works with his hands is a laborer. The man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman. The man who works with his hands, his brain, and his heart is an artist.
Louis Nizer

The written letter is something personal, organic, unique and spontaneous. It mirrors the character and the personality of the writer, and often his mood of the moment.
Emil Ruder

The scribe should choose the best and simplest forms and arrangements and master them before going further. He should have a few definite types at his fingertips, and for everyday use, a matter of a course way of putting them down on paper.
Edward Johnston

The letter beautiful is an ideal we are engaged in, and it is oftentimes our subject. As we will never be free of this, we must embrace it.
John Stevens

We warm up to feel a connection to our tools. So much of our work is about feeling. My own rituals include writing something else beforehand in order to loosen up. I want to have the right balance between feeling controlled and free. If I feel tight, I write something real loose and spontaneous. If I am feeling loose, I must focus on precision . . . all in service of getting into “the zone.”
John Stevens

Play and experimentation are the lifeblood of work. Many creative solutions have a discernible play element. This allows work to stay fresh, rather than looking rehearsed or uninspired.
John Stevens

Experiment is work without expectations. There is no predetermined outcome. We flirt with surprise or disaster. And if we are clever, we spot when we have done something new and interesting, and harvest it and own it.
John Stevens

Many words have been used to describe the qualities one aims for in pen calligraphy. Johnston’s form breaks it down nicely: unity, sharpness, and freedom. It means one’s goal is to be precise and yet achieve effortlessness at the same time (this is a basic tenet of calligraphy throughout the world).
John Stevens

The scribe strives for spontaneity, sometimes he sweats blood to make it look easy, for spontaneity is the life blood of calligraphy.
Ray Da Boll

In the end, what matters most can be distilled to a set of three values: beauty, expression, and excellence. One can get a lot of mileage out of pursuing those three values. Let’s stay open and not let so-called “expressive calligraphy” be our only option.
John Stevens

Rather than rely on a cache of styles, learn at least a little about letterform modification.
John Stevens

To summarize: you diverge (expand your vision through experimentation) and converge (learn to use the possibilities, choosing new forms that work and apply them).
John Stevens

Letters act as practical and useful signs, but also as pure and inner melody.
Wassily Kandinsky

Calligraphy is the ultimate synthesis of what I love: language, art and human connection.
Joy Deneen

My challenge is to paint the music of poetry, the motion of poetry, the part that cannot be understood.
Thomas Ingmire

I believe that working only from the conscious limits one’s creativity — whereas transcending consciousness can enhance the inner life of a work of art.
Denis Brown

I look at lettering as a huge palette which includes calligraphy, type forms, and everything in between. The colours of that palette can be mixed into an infinite variety of blends.
Julian Waters

Calligraphy is about the confident gesture, the gracefully living mark made by a human being, which, unthwarted by additional parameters, speaks the universal language of the human spirit.
Steven Skaggs

There are no [calligraphy] authorities. Listen carefully, take notes, but believe only what you experience.
Tina Vickers

It is the words that are read, but the calligraphy that is felt.
Steven Skaggs

Calligraphy is the most direct form of all artistic expression. Just as each movement of the dancer is absolute, so every gesture of the calligrapher is essential. It is not the meaning of the character but the writing — the movement of execution and the action itself — that is important.
Tseng Yu-ho Ecke

As you work with different teachers, you may note that the truly inspirational and great ones are not dogmatic about letterform, technique or methodology.
Tina Vickers

Lettering practice will always exert a good influence in your handwriting. Rarely does anyone continue to write awkwardly if he has spent much time working with letterforms. Every cultured person ought to understand how much harmony and expressive power well-formed letters can give to a written page.
Friedrich Neugebauer

Whence did the wondrous mystic art arise
Of painting speech and speaking to the eyes?
That we, by tracing magic lines
Are taught how to embody and to colour thoughts.
William Massey

Letters are symbols which turn matter into spirit.
Alphonse de Lamartine

The letters of our Roman alphabet are like people in their infinite variety. Some are short and squat, others tall and slender; some run and caper about joyfully, others refuse to budge from their appointed places. Letters have a life of their own.
Paul Shaw

Writing has a magical force. It is a living language converted to a graphic expression.
Tim Girvin

Despite the hard work and frustration, the striving for excellence is part of the fun of lettering.
Marsha Brady

The making of letters in every form is for me the purest and the greatest pleasure, and at many stages of my life, it was to me what a song is to the singer, a picture to the painter, a shout to the elated, ore a sign to the oppressed. It was and is for me the most happy and perfect expression of my life.
Rudolf Koch

Lettering is my music.
Peter Thornton

Every bottle of ink contains at least one good letter … and it’s at the bottom.
Peter Thornton

Calligraphy is like crawling into a funnel from the wrong end: the farther you go, the more there is to learn and do. It is a never-ending source of pleasure.
Sheila Waters

More powerful than all poetry, more pervasive than all science, more profound than all philosophy are the letters of the alphabet, twenty-six pillars of strength upon which our culture rests.
anonymous

Geometry can produce legible letters, but art alone makes them beautiful.
Paul Standard

… the problem before us is fairly simple —To make good letters and to arrange them well.
Edward Johnston (Writing & Illuminating & Lettering)

It is well to recognize at once, the fact that mere taking to pieces, or analysing, followed by “putting together,” is only a means of becoming acquainted with the mechanism of construction, and will not reproduce the original beauty of a thing; it is an education for work, but all work which is honest and straightforward has a beauty and freshness of its own.
Edward Johnston (Writing & Illuminating & Lettering)

On spacing letters, words and lines: It is sufficient for the beginner to take care that two curved letters are made very near each other, and that two straight strokes are spaced well apart.
Edward Johnston (Writing & Illuminating & Lettering)

About practice: A broad nib is used in preference to a narrow one, so that the characteristics of true pen-work are brought out and the faults made clear.
Edward Johnston (Writing & Illuminating & Lettering)

Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, also showed that printing, cursive writing and keyboard typing produces different effects in the brains of schoolchildren. She found, for example, that children who joined letters together as they wrote were able to generate more ideas and words than those who hit the keyboards — the flowing script aided not only fluency of language but also of thinking.

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calligraphy quotes | Cute, Modern And Inspirational Calligraphy Quotes

Cute, Modern And Inspirational Calligraphy Quotes

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