Eva Zeisel Quotes

The playful search for beauty.

Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

When I design something, I think of it as a gift to somebody else.

Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.

I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind.

I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.

I am a maker of useful things.

Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

Beautiful things make people happy.

Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.

If you think of beautiful things, you’re not sad.

My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists.

If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas.

When you begin your work, nothing exists. When it is finished it looks as if it just happened, spontaneously, effortlessly, convincingly. It looks as though it had been there all along.

My work is very bodily. It's not a shell, but a body.

I don't know the difference between working and not working.

I made the things particularly because I wanted them to see the world.

The pleasure of making things beautiful or useful involves your feelings as well as your thinking. When your original sketch evolves into a tangible, three-dimensional object, your heart is anxiously following the process of your work. And the love involved in making it is conveyed to those for whom you made it.

I think with my hands. I design things to be touched-not for a museum. A piece is ready when it has the shape of something to cherish.

I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

Art has more ego to it than what I do.

My designs are meant to attract the hand as well as the eye.

The designer must understand that form does not follow function nor does form follow a production process. For every use and for every production process there are innumerable equally attractive solutions.

If I hadn't been a designer, I'd have been a painter. I began as a painter and learned the craft of pottery in order to support myself.

When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.

When I met my designs in the market of a remote village in the West Indies, or in the airport restaurant in Zurich, I felt like the mother of many well-behaved children.

To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.