Top 50 Louise Berliawsky Nevelson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You must create your own world. I am responsible for my world.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

2. “When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

3. “I think all great innovations are built on rejections.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

4. “True strength is delicate.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

5. “We must create our own world.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

6. “No matter how individual we humans are, we are a composite of everything we are aware of. We are a mirror of our times.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

7. “Character is the architect of the being.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

8. “What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

9. “I have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

10. “I never liked the middle ground-the most boring place in the world.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

11. “I see no reason why I should tickle stones or waste time on polishing bronze.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

12. “A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

13. “I don’t demand that all work be a masterpiece. What I am doing is the right thing for me – that is what I am and this is living. It reflects me and I reflect it.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

14. “I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

15. “I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

16. “I believe that the physical is the geography of the being.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

17. “Some of us come on earth seeing – some of us come on earth seeing color.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

18. “In the end, as you get older and older, your life is your life, and you are alone with it.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

19. “I was discouraged about life, discouraged about people being blind, but I don’t think I had a day that I ever questioned creativity. There has never been a day like that.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

20. “Most of us have to be transplanted before we blossom.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

21. “My husband’s family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

22. “I feel totally female. I didn’t compete with men and I don’t want to look like a man! I love being a lady and dressing up and masquerading and wearing all the fineries. I’m breaking down the idea that the artist has to look poor, with berets.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

23. “I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

24. “I’ve taught, and the first thing I did when I taught art, was not to teach art.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

25. “I believe in my work and in the joy of it. You have to be with the work and the work has to be with you. It absorbs you totally and you absorb it totally.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

26. “When you are doing a piece you are with it. You don’t want to wait until next week, when experience will have given you something else.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

27. “I think people should think a million times before they give birth. The guilts of motherhood were the worst guilts in the world for me. They were really insurmountable. You see, you are depriving another human being of so many things, and the other party also knows it.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

28. “If you have got a living force and you’re not using it, nature kicks you back. The blood boils just like you put it in a pot.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

29. “A whisper can be stronger, as an atom is stronger, than a whole mountain.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

30. “I’m in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I’m in the process of working.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

31. “I feel that women ‘and men,’ but I mean the ‘individual,’ can be totally feminine and still be totally powerful.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

32. “I think that in the sexual act, as delightful as it can be, the very physical part of it is, yes, a hammering away. So it has a certain brutality.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

33. “It gave me great pleasure to think that I could take wood, make it good, and make people like Rockefeller buy it with paper money.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

34. “My mother was very sympathetic. She was the one who really gave me the courage to take my freedom.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

35. “Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it’s always kind of innocent and refreshing. So it’s always virginal to me, and it’s always a surprise.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

36. “It is as hard to take success as it is failure.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

37. “It’s a hell of a thing to be born, and if you’re born you’re at least entitled to your own self.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

38. “The outside wold pressures you into a mold, but if you don’t accept that – you gamble with life. Call it gambling.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

39. “I knew that a day I took away from the work did not make me too happy.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

40. “I never for one minute questioned what I had to do. I did not think for one minute that I didn’t have what I had. If just didn’t dawn on me. And so if you know what you have, then you know that there’s nobody on earth that can affect you.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

41. “I only know this – that you can’t give advice to an artist.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

42. “I still want to do my work. I still want to do my livingness. And I have lived. I have been fulfilled. I recognized what I had, and I never sold it short. And I ain’t through yet.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

43. “What we start with is a conviction to fulfill our being. Horses, trees fulfill themselves. Why shouldn’t people.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

44. “The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

45. “A woman may not hit a ball stronger than a man, but it is different. I prize that difference.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

46. “I began to stack my sculptures into an environment. It was natural. It was a flowing of energy.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

47. “I’ve been so lonely for long periods of my life that if a rat walked in I would have welcomed it.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

48. “In my studio I’m as happy as a cow in her stall. That’s the only place where everything is all right.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

49. “Greatness breaks laws.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

50. “Early in school, they called me ‘the artist.’ When teachers wanted things painted, they called upon me, they called upon ‘the artist.’ I am not saying that I learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it.”

— Louise Berliawsky Nevelson