Caspar David Friedrich Quotes

You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.

I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensible for my dialogue with nature.

Why, it has often occurred to me to ask myself, do I so frequently choose death, transience, and the grave as subjects for my paintings? One must submit oneself many times to death in order some day to attain life everlasting.

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.

Since such ideas are concerned largely with interpretation, it is often felt that Romanticism is no more than an attitude of mind. It is certainly true that one cannot catalog a Romantic style by means of an inventory of features, for the sense of a heightened reality can be felt as much in the dramatic bravura of a Delacroix like Liberty Leading the People as in the intense precision of a Caspar David Friedrich like the Arctic Shipwreck. But nor can one look upon Romantic art as the mere illustration of a set of ideas (an attitude that has often led Romanticism to be seen as 'unpictorial', something that has its place, no doubt, in literature but could only lead to a confusion of values in the visual arts). If a poem can indissolubly link a feeling and the rhythm of sounds, then a picture can also encompass the duality of imagery and form.

listening to the Junior Boys after Grime or Dubstep is like walking out of a locker room thick with dope smoke out onto a Caspar David Friedrich mountain.

In the wildest wind, 2 hands smile a new tiny wanderer!