A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A genuine work of art usually displeases at first sight, as it suggests a deficiency in the spectator.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote Topics

Art Deficiency First Genuine Sight Spectator Work

Quote Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German - Novelist
August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832

Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

Clement Greenberg

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

Bernard Berenson

If 'Spectator Business' works, we will continue this brand extension strategy and look at everything from 'Spectator Arts' to 'Spectator Style and Travel' or 'Spectator Connoisseur.'

Andrew Neil

Your medical documents will say Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome that is AIDS. What that means you have got this challenge of immune deficiency. Alright what causes immune deficiency? HIV. Alright. Is that all that causes immune deficiency? The medical textbooks will say there are other things that cause immune deficiency. There is also genetic immune deficiency that is a different phenomenon.

Thabo Mbeki

The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.

Lawren Harris

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

Oscar Wilde

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Oscar Wilde

Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times...

Franz Marc

Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.

Franz Marc

No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.

Thomas Carlyle

If someone has failed, that is not a deficiency for me. I think that he has more motivation. I've seen many examples where someone was successful first and failed later and failed first and then succeeded. If they failed in an honest way, I don't see it as a deficiency.

Yossi Vardi

Educators, long disturbed by schoolchildren's lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional literacy. And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that "we care more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they'll be alive next week."

Daniel Goleman

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

E. M. Forster

I certainly don't believe in love at first sight. I definitely believe in a lot of chemistry and lust at first sight. I think that love is something that takes work.