Kathe Kollwitz Quotes

While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate.

The development of the national spirit in its present form leads into blind alleys. Some condition must be found which preserves the life of the nation, but rules out the fatal rivalry among nations.

Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even. ... As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents.

It seems to me nowadays that the most important task for someone who is aging is to spread love and warmth whenever possible.

I am afraid of dying-but being dead, oh yes, that to me is often an appealing prospect.

Men without joy seem like corpses.

No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.

I am in the world to change the world.

I thought I was a revolutionary and was only an evolutionary.

Growing old is partly an inescapable process of accommodation and adjustment.

Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?

As in everything else, I find that age is not good for much, that one becomes deafer and less sensitive. Also, the higher up the mountain you climb, the less of a view you get. A mist closes in and cheats you of the hoped-for and expected opportunity to see far and wide.

Bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production; at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work.

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

There must be understanding between the artist and the people. In the best ages of art that has always been the case. Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more.

To this day I do not know whether the power which has inspired my works is something related to religion, or is indeed religion itself.

Every war carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.

Pacifism simply is not a matter of calm looking on; it is work, hard work.

I have never been able to carry out any work coolly. On the contrary it is done, so to speak, with my own blood. Anyone who looks at my works must be able to sense that.

It is my duty to voice the sufferings of humankind, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain high. This is my task, but it is not an easy one to fulfill.

There are moments on most days when I feel a deep and sincere gratitude, when I sit at the open window, and there is a blue sky or moving clouds.

Old ideas die hard. We've had thousands of years of women having almost no rights. Parts of the world are in a struggle toward very basic human rights for women, and most of the world isn't even there yet. And it's going to take a long time to change these attitudes.

I can always paint very well with my eyes, but with my hands it doesn't always work out.

I do not want to die... until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me, until the last small twig has grown.

When Michelangelo was an old man, he drew himself sitting in a child's pushcart.

Look at life with the eyes of a child.