Anselm Kiefer Quotes

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

The great wisdom of the world comes from the very old.

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols

Each of us has these little desks that you can’t write anything on. But inside the drawer the names of the previous senators using that desk are carved in the wood.

Without history one remains always a child.

It embodied what came before. Illuminated what came after.

I want to make sure people are connected with the future as well as the past.

we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

People who have gone, are still here, in us. Places we came from, are carried to the places we go.

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

What we have loved Others will love And we will teach them how.

In this land of the Ganga (Varanasi), there was education of culture. But, more importantly, there was a culture of education.

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

Monuments are the grappling-irons that bind one generation to another.