Friedrich Schiller Art Quotations

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time.

The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception and spirit and design he is hardly below even the poet.

Toil of science swells the wealth of art.

Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Art is difficult, transient is her reward.

If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.

If thou art something bring thy soul and interchange with mine. - Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.

Life is earnest, art is gay.

Art is the right hand of Nature.

Appearance should never attain reality, And if nature conquers, then must art retire.

Seraphs share with thee Knowledge; but Art, O Man, is thine alone!

The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.

If the art of gardening is at last to turn back from her extravagances and rest with her other sisters, it is, above everything, necessary to have clearly before you what you require . . . It is certainly tasteless and inconsistent to desire to encompass the world with a garden-wall, but very practicable and reasonable to make a garden . . . into a characteristic whole to the eye, heart, and nderstanding alike.

Art is the daughter of freedom.