Gerhard Richter Believe Quotations

Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. ... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.

I believe that he knew more what he was doing. I might be absolutely wrong about this, but that was my impression.

I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.

Well, I don't believe there are subjects that can't be painted, but there are a lot of things that I personally can't paint.

To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.

I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false

I believe that the quintessential task of every painter in any time has been to concentrate on the essential.

I believe that you always have to believe. It's the only way; after all we both believe that we will do this exhibition. But I can't believe in God, as such, he's either too big or too small for me, and always incomprehensible, unbelievable.

I believe in painting and I believe in eating too. What can we do? We have to eat, we have to paint, we have to live. Of course, there are different ways to survive. But it's my best option.

I don't believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.