“The horse carries the rider with power and speed. But the rider controls the horse. Talent carries the artist to great heights with power and speed. But the artist directs his talent. That is the element of 'consciousness', of 'calculation' in the work – or whatever else one chooses to call it.”

— Wassily Kandinsky

Source: 1916 -1920, Autobiography', 1918, p. 31

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The horse carries the rider with power and speed. But the rider controls the horse. Talent carries the artist to great …" by Wassily Kandinsky?

Wassily Kandinsky 68

Russian painter 1866–1944

Related quotes

“The throb of fifty or a hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

De Libero Arbitrio (388 - 395)

“One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

The Anatomy of the Mental Personality (Lecture 31)
1930s, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis" https://books.google.com/books/about/New_Introductory_Lectures_on_Psycho_anal.html?id=hIqaep1qKRYC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false (1933)
Context: One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.