Christian Morgenstern Quotes

Home is not where you live but where they understand you.

The hidden child wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer.

There are often some hundred times, a thousand times, before you can really see it for the first time.

Woe to humanity, should only a single animal have a seat in the Last Judgement.

In every work of art, the artist himself is present.

Enthusiasm is the most beautiful word on earth.

If modern civilization man had to kill the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically.

In every man there is a hidden child which is called the urge to create and he prefers as play things and serious things not the miniature ships, recreated in the minutest detail, but the walnutshell with a bird feather as mast and sail and a pebble as the captain. He also wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer. For this "child in man" is the immortal creator within him.

Home isn't where our house is, but wherever we are understood.

Humor is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.

A true artist never portrays to please, but to show.

The first principle of child-rearing is to choose a good mother.

Chess truly uncovers whether or not someone has imagination and takes initiative.

For me, there is only one means of ensuring that I do not lose respect for myself: constant criticism.

Aviation will give new nourishment to the religious sprit of mankind. It will add airspace to those other great heighteners of the cosmic mood: the wood, the sea, the desert.

If I did not love what is present, if I could not cling to this enormous, safe parachute, I would long since have fallen into the abyss.

It is one of the oddest things in the world that you can read a page or more and think of something utterly different.

You are not at home where your residence are but where you are understood.

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.

There is a ghost That eats hankerchiefs; It keeps you company On all your travels.

My method is to find a word with a gesture.

To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future.

A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet.