Daily Inspiration Quote by Eduardo Chillida

Chillida’s line reads like a sculptor talking to his material while also talking to his era: certainty is a brittle substance, and the real work begins where it breaks. “One can never know enough” isn’t academic humility so much as a studio ethic. In sculpture, you can measure, model, and calculate, then watch a tiny shift in weight or texture overturn the plan. Knowledge isn’t a finish line; it’s the surface you push against.

The second sentence does the sharper turn. “The unknown and its call” gives ignorance a voice, almost a vocation. Chillida isn’t romanticizing mystery for its own sake; he’s describing how art happens when the familiar starts to leak. “Lies even in what we know” suggests that the unknown isn’t outside the map, it’s inside it - embedded in assumptions, in language, in the way a hand learns a technique and then discovers its limits. That’s a distinctly modernist move: treat mastery as a doorway, not a throne.

Context matters: Chillida’s work is famously in dialogue with space - iron and stone shaping emptiness as much as mass. His quote mirrors that logic. What we “know” is the solid, the form, the practiced skill. The “unknown” is the void it creates and reveals: the negative space, the unanswerable question, the next cut you can’t undo. The subtext is a warning against complacency dressed up as curiosity: if you think you’ve arrived, you’ve stopped listening.