Art Historian

Quotes & Thinkers in Art Historian

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

"What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul"

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

1819–1900

"Punishment is the last and least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime."

"Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin."

"Our civilization … is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it."

"The 2nd of April at 9:45 a.m. Max Ernst had his first contact with the sensible world, when he came out of the egg which his mother had laid in an eagle's nest and which the bird had brooded for seven years."

"Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities."

"Only those who have experienced the elation and despair which comes from the attempt to express their feelings about vision in oil paint will know that it is impossible to speak with complete impartiality about art."

"The castle was far more than a walled and turreted fortress; it was an instrument of social control and the symbol of power, authority, and wealth."

"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."

2 quotes

🇺🇸Philip Johnson

Art

postmodern architecture

1906–2005

"I like Houston. It's the last great 19th-century city. Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism. People there aren't afraid to try something new."

"The words in a poem, are vocal signs that convey an intangible essence that vanishes the moment we approach it with an analytical intelligence."

"There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul."

"A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself."

"The theatre gives us representations of things , and there we see a sort of moving, speaking pictures but they are transient whereas painting remains and is always at hand."

"Annotated bibliography for Pierre Curie from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues"

4 quotes

🇬🇧Nicholas Serota

b. 1946

"The argument that new vision becomes the reference point for the future, is a line that I have been driven to use on many occasions."

"Tchaikovsky thought of committing suicide for fear of being discovered as a homosexual, but today, if you are a composer and not homosexual, you might as well put a bullet through your head."

"Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development."

"The story of the rise, fall, and forgetting of the individual is the tale of the rise, fall, and repression of psychoanalysis."

50 quotes

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1729–1781

"Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel."

"Art is something given, not reproduced... the painter paints what he sees with his innermost senses, the expression of his being.. every other impression becomes, for him, an inner expression."

"In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives."

"By definition, a catalogue raissonne employs methodical scholarship to gather and digest in systematic form all that can be known of an artist's work and life. In short the evidence of his intellectual and cultural life."

"Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom."

"It will be like the end of time when the Queen dies."

"The passion for seeking the truth for truth's sake...can be kept alive only if we continue to seek the truth for truth's sake."

"Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility."

"I used to buy a group of objects -- let's say, 10 objects for $US100,000 -- keep 3 or 4 of the best aside and sell the rest for $US250,000. I used my knowledge to create money to finance my dream."

"Bourgeois scientists make sure that their theories are not dangerous to God or Capital."

"What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves.... He must have the passion of a lover."

"The second romantics are true seers: Th. Gautier, Lec. de Lisle, Th. de Banville. But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead."

2 quotes