Eva Zeisel Quotes

The playful search for beauty.

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.

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.

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

Art has more ego to it than what I do.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Beautiful things make people happy.

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.