Goethe Art Quotes & Sayings

We can stand only a certain amount of unhappiness; anything beyond that annihilates us or passes us by, leaving us apathethetic. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of beingcreated so as to understand them to some degree. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Woman is mistress of the art of completely imbittering the life of the person on whom she depends. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements. — Kenneth Clark

To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Oh my God, but art is long / and our life is fleeting. — Ghadirian

If you have science and art,
You also have religion;
But if you don't have them,
You better have religion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If the whole world I once could see On free soil stand, with the people free Then to the moment might I say, Linger awhile ... so fair thou art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A genuine work of art usually displeases at first sight, as it suggests a deficiency in the spectator. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The misery that oppresses you lies not in your profession but in yourself! What man in the world would not find his situation intolerable if he chooses a craft, an art, indeed any form of life, without experiencing an inner calling? Whoever is born with a talent, or to a talent, must surely find in that the most pleasing of occupations! Everything on this earth has its difficult sides! Only some inner drive - pleasure, love - can help us overcome obstacles, prepare a path, and lift us out of the narrow circle in which others tread out their anguished, miserable existences! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

For the nature of a women is closely allied to art.
[Ger., Denn das Naturell der Frauen
Ist so nah mit Kunst verwandt.] — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In art it's not the thinking that does the job, but making. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A school of art or of anything else is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence. — Thomas Carlyle

The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Colors are light's suffering and joy — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Give shape, artist! don't talk!
Your poem be but a breath. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In reality," he told Paulina, after knowing her a short time, "endings are unworthy of art. Works of art are always unfinished. Whoever creates them is never sure of having finished them. The same is true of all the best things in life. Goethe, even though he was a German, was right about this: 'Every beginning is beautiful, but one must stop on the threshold. — Angeles Mastretta

Wind is the loving Wooer of waters; Wind blends together Billows all-foaming. Spirit of man, Thou art like unto water! Fortune of man, Thou art like unto wind! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is no better deliverance from the world than through art, and a man can form no surer bond with it. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When I say to the Moment flying;
'Linger a while
thou art so fair!'
Then bind me in thy bonds undying,
And my final ruin I will bear! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The art of living rightly is like all arts; it must be learned and practiced with incessant care. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You can't, if you can't feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You'll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other's scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration's to your taste,
But you'll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart's space. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The art of governing is a great metier, requiring the whole man, and it is therefore not well for a ruler to have too strong tendencies for other affairs. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In all things, to serve from the lowest station upwards is necessary. To restrict yourself to a trade is best. For the narrow mind, whatever he attempts is still a trade; for the higher, an art; and the highest in doing one thing does all, or, to speak less paradoxically, in the one thing which he does rightly he sees the likeness of all that is done rightly. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Mozart is a human incarnation of the divine force of creation. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion,
on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The dance is the most universal of the arts, since, as Goethe justly said, it could destroy all the fine arts. It is an expression of all the emotions of the spirit, from the lowest to the highest. It accompanies and stimulates all the processes of life, from hunting and farming to war and fertility, from love to death. It enables, in turn other arts to come into being: music, song, drama. Despite all their riches, the dance is no formless complex, but a simple unity. — Gerard Van Der Leeuw

True works of art are a manifestation of the higher laws of nature. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

One cannot escape from the world with greater certainty than through art, and one cannot relate to it with greater certainty than through art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Thou art in the end what thou art. Put on wigs with millions of curls, set thy foot upon ell-high rocks. Thou abidest ever
what thou art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him. — Heinrich Heine

Art is bad when 'you see the intent and get put off.' (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself.
from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy — Joel Carmichael

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future. — John F. Kennedy

Beauty is at once the ultimate principle and the highest aim of art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The misfortune in the state is, that nobody can enjoy life in peace, but that everybody must govern; and in art, that nobody will enjoy what has been produced, but that every one wants to reproduce on his own account. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

As all Nature's thousands changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Art's wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands aye in loveliness. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is no patriotic art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Just trust yourself and you'll learn the art of living. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There are three classes of readers; some enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge. The latter class reproduces the work of art on which it is engaged. Its numbers are very small. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

What matters in art is not thinking but making. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art will always be art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people
including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh
struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124) — David N. Elkins

True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art is constitutive-the artist determines beauty. He does not take it over. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour. — Randall Jarrell

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Neither art thou the man to catch the fiend and hold him! [Ger., Du bist noch nicht der Mann den Teufel festzuhalten. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries,to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people is satisfied with ornament. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919. — Martin Filler

Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I know what science this has come to be. All rights and laws are still transmitted Like an eternal sickness of the race, - From generation unto generation fitted, And shifted round from place to place. Reason becomes a sham, Beneficence a worry: Thou art a grandchild, therefore woe to thee! The right born with us, ours in verity, — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The arts are the salt of the earth; as salt relates to food, the arts relate to technology. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear. — John Ruskin

What I have lately said of painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art? — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

This is that CONSOLATION DES ARTS which is the key-note of Gautier's poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed - as indeed what in our century is not? - by Goethe. You remember what he said to the German people: 'Only have the courage,' he said, 'to give yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something great.' The courage to give yourselves up to your impressions: yes, that is the secret of the artistic life - for while art has been defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather from the tyranny of the soul. But only to those who worship her above all things does she ever reveal her true treasure: else will she be as powerless to aid you as the mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical nature of Heine. — Oscar Wilde

For true art there is no such thing as preparatory schooling, but there are certainly preparations; the best, however, is when the least pupil takes a share in master's work. Colour-grinders have turned into very good artists. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Dear me! how long is art!
And short is our life!
I often know amid the scholar's strife
A sinking feeling in my mind and heart.
How difficult the means are to be found
By which the primal sources may be breached;
And long before the halfway point is reached,
They bury a poor devil in the ground. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art is a mediator of the unspeakable. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before us. It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written or badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We must be careful,' said Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon as we are aware of it. — Oscar Wilde

I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

One cannot escape the world more certainly through art, and one cannot bind oneself to it more certainly than through art — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

God help us -- for art is long, and life so short. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I have increasingly become conversant with Pythagoras' and Goethe's idea of a primordial music, not perceptible to the sensuous ear, but sounding and soaring throughout the cosmos. Tracing it to such exalted origins, I begin to understand more deeply the essence of our art and its elemental power over the human soul. Man, being a creature of Nature and subject to the cosmic influences that inform all earthly beings, must needs have been under the sway of that music from his earliest days; his organism reverberated with its vibrations and received it's rhythmic impulses. — Bruno Walter

It is such an agreeable feeling to be busy with something one is only half-competent to do that nobody should criticize the dilettante for taking up an art he will never learn, or blame the artist who leaves the territory of his own art for the pleasure of trying himself in a neighbouring one. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art is long, life is short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

With little art, clear wit and sense Suggest their own delivery. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

All our knowledge is symbolic. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Oftentimes I say to myself, "Thou alone art wretched: all other mortals are happy, none are distressed like thee!" Then I read a passage in an ancient poet, and I seem to understand my own heart. I have so much to endure! Have men before me ever been so wretched? — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

He who possesses science and art, Possesses religion as well; He who possesses neither of these, Had better have religion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Personality is everything in art and poetry. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art is in itself noble; that is why the artist has no fear of what is common. This, indeed, is already ennobled when he takes it up. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

No skill or art is needed to grow old; the trick is to endure it. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In art the best is good enough. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded disireable, that calls for art or for character — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

He who has art and science also has religion, but those who do not have them better have religion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art rests on a kind of religious sense, on a deep, steadfast earnestness; and on this account it unites so readily with religion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great. — Gerhard Richter