Gerhard Richter Quotes

If you're feeling low, don't despair. The sun has a sinking spell every night, but it comes back up every morning.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book

In the meantime, it just makes it a little harder to smile. But so does the world.

I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.

Cannot find the comfort in this world.

What I got was not so much gifts and whishes come trues but a feeling of peace. I got peace itself, actually. And when you have peace, you can be strong; and when you are strong, you can get through what you have to get through, and not with exhaustion and frown marks and slumped shoulders but with relative happiness, and humor, and sometimes even gaiety.

I think about giving up. I almost do.

I learned to love despair.

I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.

There's nothing in this world can make me joy.

They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.

You can walk away from your mistakes You can turn your back on what you do Just a little smile is all it takes And you can have your cake and eat it too. Loneliness will get to you somehow But ev'rybody loves you now.

He thought there was no hope for him. Me? I can't imagine a world without hope.

To create something beautiful about despair or out of a feeling of despair is for me the most hopeful life affirming thing a person can do

Do you ever feel like running away?" "Of course... Sometimes I feel like I want to run away from everything." "I remember having that feeling once when I was at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm... I climbed over the fence, but I was still in the world!

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

The so-called Real World. Human misery and sadness. Blind politics and general cruelty.

We shouldn't deny the pain of what happens in our lives. We should just refuse to focus only on the valleys.

You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.

If you're sad, add more lipstick and attack.

I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me . . . To do things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.

Life must go on, even if it's no joke...just pretend to believe in the future.

I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.

The man of regular life and rational mind never despairs.