Hermann von Helmholtz Quotes

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

I've never made a record that I'm ashamed of.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

As an artist, you do understand you're never going to please everybody.

I've always had a creative urge and I get immense satisfaction from creating something because it feels like I'm making sense of the world and imposing order on it.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.

I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to it out of hunger.

I need art around me always.

It's hard for me to judge my own films as an artist sometimes. But as an artist, I did feel a fulfillment working on them, you know?

Although it is true that by fate all things are forced and linked by a necessary and dominant reason, nevertheless the character of our minds is subject to fate in a manner corresponding to their nature and quality.

Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.

Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is.

I cannot imagine a more satisfying calling than my own: beauty, humanity, and history every day, combined with the cathartic joy of singing.

Things often offer themselves to our mind in a more finished form in the very first thought, than we might have made them by muchart and study.

Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.

Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike, And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.

It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.

Nature is constrained by the cause of her laws which dwell inborn in her. Variant: Nature is constrained by the order of her own law which lives and works within her.

Nature, never, never let's you down, it's not a cliché, nature isn't a cliché, pictures might be, but you can get tired of pictures.

Art compares to nature like wine to the grape.

The world is a living being - one nature, one soul. Keep that in mind.

Making music makes me feel vulnerable in the best possible way. It gives me a feeling of balance.

I was obliged, at last, to come to the conclusion that the contemplation of nature alone is not sufficient to fill the human heart and mind.

Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.