"The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepens his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains"
About this Quote
Notice the hard-edged pragmatism hiding inside the supposedly tender claim: “turning his pains to advantage.” That’s the language of craft, almost of economy. Suffering becomes a kind of brutal tuition, but only if it “deepens” understanding and sensibility rather than narrowing it into bitterness, narcissism, or self-mythology. Kaufmann, a key translator and interpreter of Nietzsche, is circling a familiar Nietzschean demand: transfiguration. The artist’s job is not confession for confession’s sake, but alchemy - converting private damage into something that clarifies the human situation instead of merely broadcasting it.
The subtext is an ethical standard disguised as aesthetics. “Most obviously succeeds” implies public evidence: the work must show the growth, not just claim it. And “growing through his pains” resists the passive voice of trauma narratives; it assigns agency without denying cost. In a 20th-century landscape that included war, exile, and ideological coercion, Kaufmann is staking out a humanist wager: suffering will happen; greatness lies in refusing to let it be wasted.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Evidence:
The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepen his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains.. Primary-source identification: this sentence is attributed (with surrounding context about suffering and meaning) to Walter Kaufmann’s own book *The Faith of a Heretic* (originally published 1961). Multiple independent quote indexes consistently point to this book as the source, but in the material accessible via web search results I could not retrieve a scan/snippet from the 1961 edition that includes a verifiable page number. A non-primary webpage reproduces a longer passage and embeds this sentence in prose that appears to be from the book, but that site could not be fetched reliably in-tool (encoding error), so I did not use it as the verifying primary text. To verify “first published,” you should consult the 1961 first edition (or earliest printing) and locate the sentence in the chapter discussing suffering/meaning; a library scan (HathiTrust/Internet Archive) or physical copy would allow confirming exact pagination. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Kaufmann, Walter. (2026, February 9). The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepens his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-great-artist-is-the-man-who-most-obviously-100055/
Chicago Style
Kaufmann, Walter. "The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepens his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains." FixQuotes. February 9, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-great-artist-is-the-man-who-most-obviously-100055/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepens his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains." FixQuotes, 9 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-great-artist-is-the-man-who-most-obviously-100055/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2026.
