Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

No artist tolerates reality.

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

Film is important; it can be more than reportage or a novel - it creates images people have never seen before, never imagined they'd see, maybe because they needed someone else to imagine them.

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I sometimes am challenged to imagine where the timbre of art should be. Should it be about objects that point to this current moment, or how objects are related to ideas of this current moment?

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

Basically, an artist should be a mirror, or a reflection of society or his or her environment. What you see is what you can articulate.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.