Käthe Kollwitz Quotes

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

“I am in the world to change the world.”

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

“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.”

“I was put in this world to change it.”

“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.”

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

“Look at life with the eyes of a child.”

“My work is not, of course, pure art in the sense that Schmidt-Rottluff's is, but it is art nonetheless.

It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time, in which human beings are so confused and in need of help.”

“One day, a new ideal will arise, and there will be an end to all wars. I die convinced of this. It will need much hard work, but it will be achieved.

The important thing, until that happens, is to hold one's banner high and to struggle. Without struggle there is no life.”

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

“I have received a commission to make a poster against war. That is a task that makes me happy.

Some may say a thousand times that this is not pure art but as long as I can work, I want to be effective with my art.”

“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.”

“Culture arises only when the individual fulfills his cycle of obligations. If everyone recognizes and fulfills his cycle of obligations, genuineness emerges. The culture of a whole nation can in the final analysis be built upon nothing else.”

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

“For me the Koenigsberg longshoremen had beauty; the Polish jimkes on their grain ships had beauty; the broad freedom of movement in the gestures of the common people had beauty. Middle-class people held no appeal for me at all.”

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

“How long were the stretches of toilsome tacking back and forth, of being blocked, of being thrown back again and again. But all that was annulled by the periods when I had my technique in hand and succeeded in doing what I wanted.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Men without joy seem like corpses.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”