It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheIf you are to accomplish all that one demands of you, you must overestimate your own worth.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheEvery individual who is not creative has a negative, narrow, exclusive taste and succeeds in depriving creative being of its energy and life.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheSo then the year is repeating its old story again. We are come once more, thank God! to its most charming chapter. The violets and the Mayflowers are as its inscriptions or vignettes. It always makes a pleasant impression on us, when we open again at these pages of the book of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe