“No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.”

Letter 9
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

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Friedrich Schiller 111
German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright 1759–1805

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Context: The artist is usually a child of his times, especially if his formative years fell in the period of early socialism. My formative years coincided with that period, and I was totally caught up in the socialist movement. At that time, the idea of a conscious commitment to serve the proletariat was the farthest thing from my mind. But what use to me were principles of beauty like those of the Greeks, for example, principles that I could not feel as my own and identify with? The simple fact of the matter was that I found the proletariat beautiful.

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