Jo Franz Quotes

You believe happiness to be derived from the place in which once you have been happy, but in truth it is centered in ourselves.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future.

The disease of mutual distrust among nations is the bane of modern civilization

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.

In Hungary all native music, in its origin, is divided naturally into melody destined for song or melody for the dance.

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,but this is not true.I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.

Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief.

If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.

The passion for seeking the truth for truth's sake can be kept alive only if we continue to seek the truth for truth's sake.

First impressions are always unreliable.

We are staunch and true and in rather a champagne mood.

I never, for instance, have the urge to paint animals 'the way I see them,' but rather the way they are... The way they themselves look at the world and feel their being

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: do the painter's emotions come across?

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

I never wish to be easily defined.

No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics.

If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

There is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established.

No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

The fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life.

Since Sven Goran Eriksson took over, England have been fantastic.

With the proper motivation, that is, a good reason for wanting to do it, your mind can overcome any sort of adversity.

Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.

Especially in times of collective neurosis, the existence of . . . mature people is of crucial importance.

Only the moment counts. It determines life.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy on me.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science

A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense.

Love brings to life whatever is dead around us.

Truth is a great flirt.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

I am composing like a god, as if it simply had to be done as it has been done.

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

So let us not worry, and look instead as it has been taught us to do, as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, keeping complete faith in Our Father's goodness.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.