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"There is no higher or purer pleasure than to sit with closed eyes and hear a naturally expressive voice recite... a play of Shakespeare's."
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"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."

"One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin."

"Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become."

"A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture."

"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."

"When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines."
Explore more quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath."

"A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness."

"If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."

"Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion."

"You can't, if you can't feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You'll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other's scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration's to your taste,But you'll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart's space."

"Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity."

"Each one's no longer consciousOf the high wall, or the rest:Since the one enduring fortress,Is the soldier's iron breast.If you'd live unconquered,Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:Every wife an Amazon bred,And every child a hero."
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