Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Art Quotes

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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
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
Beauty is at once the ultimate principle and the highest aim of art.

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

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
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
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
Mathematics, like dialectics, is an instrument of the inner higher sense, while in practice it is an art like rhetoric. For both of these, nothing has value but form; content is immaterial. Whether mathematics is adding up pennies or guineas, whether rhetoric is defending truth or falsehood, makes no difference to either.

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
The arts are the salt of the earth; as salt relates to food, the arts relate to technology.

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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Applied to practice, it [mathematics] becomes an art, like RHETORIC. In both these arts the form is everything, the substance nothing. To mathematics it is indifferent whether it reckons pence or pounds; to RHETORIC, whether it defends truth or falsehood.

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

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
For the rest of it, the last and greatest art is to limit and isolate oneself.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Who science has and art
He has religion too
Who neither of them owns
Religion is his due.

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
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
The architect hands over to the rich man with the keys to his palace all the ease and comfort to be found in it without being able to enjoy any of it himself. Must the artist not in this way gradually become alienated from his art, since his work, like a child that has been provided for and left home, can no longer have any effect upon its father? And how beneficial it must have been for art when it was intended to be concerned almost exclusively with what was public property, and belonged to everybody and therefore also to the artist!

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
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
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
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe