Top 30 M.C. Escher Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My work is a game, a very serious game.”

— M.C. Escher

Featured in: Quotes About Work

2. “We adore chaos because we love to produce order.”

— M.C. Escher

3. “Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?”

— M.C. Escher

4. “I don’t use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.”

— M.C. Escher

5. “So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen.”

— M.C. Escher

6. “Wonder is the salt of the earth.”

— M.C. Escher

7. “He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.”

— M.C. Escher

8. “I don’t grow up. In me is the small child of my early days.”

— M.C. Escher

9. “I could fill an entire second life with working on my prints.”

— M.C. Escher

10. “The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure.”

— M.C. Escher

11. “Simplicity and order are, if not the principal, then certainly the most important guidelines for human beings in general.”

— M.C. Escher

12. “It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say.”

— M.C. Escher

13. “Originality is merely an illusion.”

— M.C. Escher

14. “I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.”

— M.C. Escher

15. “I might be in the basement. I’ll go upstairs and check.”

— M.C. Escher

16. “I am a graphic artist heart and soul, though I find the term artist rather embarrassing.”

— M.C. Escher

17. “I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well.”

— M.C. Escher

18. “Hands, are the most honest part of the human body, they cannot lie as laughing eyes and the mouth can.”

— M.C. Escher

19. “What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.”

— M.C. Escher

20. “A woman once rang me up and said, ‘Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print -Reptiles- you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.’ I replied, ‘Madam, if that’s the way you see it, so be it.’”

— M.C. Escher

21. “I can’t keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.”

— M.C. Escher

Featured in: Fun Quotes

22. “I am always wandering around in enigmas. There are young people who constantly come to tell me: you, too, are making Op Art. I haven’t the slightest idea what that is, Op Art. I’ve been doing this work for thirty years now.”

— M.C. Escher

23. “I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me.”

— M.C. Escher

24. “I want to find happiness in the tiniest of things – a minute moss plant, 2 cm across, on a rock – and I want to try to do what I’ve been wanting to do for so long, that is, to copy these infinitesimally small things as precisely as possible and to be aware of their size.”

— M.C. Escher

25. “Science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the boderline between the two respective domains.”

— M.C. Escher

26. “To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am.”

— M.C. Escher

27. “I might be in the basement. I’ll go upstairs and check. We adore chaos because we love to produce order. I don’t use drugs; my dreams are frightening enough.”

— M.C. Escher

28. “There is something breathtaking about the basic laws of crystals. They are in no sense a discovery of the human mind; they just “are” – they exist quite independently of us. The most that man can do is become aware, in a moment of clarity, that they are there, and take cognizance of them.”

— M.C. Escher

29. “At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.”

— M.C. Escher

30. “As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses.”

— M.C. Escher

31. “Drawing is deception.”

— M.C. Escher

32. “We do not know space. We do not see it, we do not hear it, we do not feel it. We are standing in the middle of it, we ourselves are part of it, but we know nothing about it.”

— M.C. Escher

33. “Baarn, 5 July 1964: ‘On the train to Utrecht I was suddenly overwhelmed and enormously moved by a sky full of clouds at different levels. I experienced a sense of space and three-dimensionality such as I’d not experienced for a long time. It’s possible to suddenly become aware of these things, even in an overpopulated country like Holland. Provided that you are looking up, you’ll suddenly see that timeless and unbounded eternity. Do you think it silly, or can you imagine what I mean?”

— M.C. Escher