For him, there were no empty hours, no hours that were mere bridges spanning to richer ones ahead, and nothing that lay worthless along his path, nothing he could pass by as a stranger. All things had turned their countenances towards him, were there for his sake, and he was incapable of detaching their fate from his own.
And more than that, he had only sought himself in all things and in all things only found himself.
Richard Beer-Hofman, The Death of George, 1900.
I will never, and certainly never under this administration, participate in an official exhibit... I want to free myself. I want my freedom back from all these unedifying and ridiculous matters which only keep me from my work. I want to stand up against the cavalier way artistic matters are dealt with by the Ministry of Education in the Austrian state. Every opportunity is taken to discourage real art and real artists. Only the weak and the false get sponsored. We need a clearly defined separation. The state has no right to act like a patron of the arts when its hand-outs are paltry, nor does it have the right to dictate what gets exhibited and under what terms. Its only duty is to act as intermediary and commercial factor; otherwise it is to leave all matter concerning artistic initiatives completely to artists. The civil servant has no business in the art schools..."
Gustav Klimt commenting on how his paintings for a university hall were rejected in 1905
Meaning is found solely by him who seeks it.
Into one another flow dream and waking,
Truth and falsehood. Certainty is nowhere.
We know naugh o others, nor of ourselves.
We are forever at play - he who knows that is the wiser!
Arthur Schnitzler, "Paracelsus", 1898
The awareness of visions is not just a state of mind
in which one realizes and perceives things,
but a state of mind where conscience perceives itself.
Oskar Kokoschka, "On the Nature of Visions", lecture 1912
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