Quote collection
487 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are."
"Those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious."
"But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song."
"The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted."
"... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust."
"One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence."
"One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one."
"He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work."
"You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change when you were sad?"
"Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything."
"Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it."
"That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things."
"Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence."
"I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open."
"And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?"
"Spring has again returned. The Earth is like a child that knows many poems. Many, O so many. For the hardship of such long learning she receives the prize. Strict was her teacher. The white in the old man's beard pleases us. Now, what to call green, to call blue, we dare to ask: She knows, She knows!"
"Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones."
"No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger."
"I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read."
"Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts."