Artists

"In a way, artists are messengers between worlds, bringing ideas and symbols from one to the other."

"That's what we do as artists: we collect, we connect, we serve as scribes for the collective culture, and as messengers between worlds. Most important, we bring these symbols to the public. This is our gift, our regalo, our ofrenda. But it's up to the reader, the viewer, the listener, to bring out the power of these stories, to call out their names, and give them a place in the world."

"All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unalike."

"One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art."

"Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive."

"Being an artist is about creative freedom. I want to save the world and that's why social commentary is always present in my work. It's easy to live with your eyes shut but that's not fulfilling or helpful to the world."

"“He is difficult to work with, like every real artist, but certainly fond of money—” “Like every real artist. I believe I see your point.”"

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"Artists shouldn't be made famous."

"An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation."

"In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men."

"Art is the complement of science. Science as I have said is concerned wholly with relations, not with individuals. Art, on the other hand, is not only the disclosure of the individuality of the artist but also a manifestation of individuality as creative of the future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in the past. Some artists in their vision of what might be but is not, have been conscious rebels. But conscious protest and revolt is not the form which the labor of the artist in creation of the future must necessarily take. Discontent with things as they are is normally the expression of the vision of what may be and is not, art in being the manifestation of individuality is this prophetic vision."

"If I were asked to saywhat distinguishes an artistic temperament from any other, I'd say that it's a fundamental sense that the project of being aliveis something peculiar, little understood."

"Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing."

"Just picture it to yourself," he would explain. "From the depths of the universe, millions of eyes are looking down, and what do they see? A dull, monochrome grey mass crawling and crawling over the earth, then suddenly, like a pistol shot — a bright red blob! That's me going outside."

"We become expert artists because of love’s investment, not capitalism’s."

"Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike."

"I have come to the conclusion that a work of art restricted to what the artist has put in it is only a part of itself. It only attains full stature with what people and time make of it. It involves the whole complex of human relation to life. It is a mode of thinking, acting, perceiving and living."

"[T]he entrepreneur is the focal point at which the dynamic forces... materialize into action for economic progress. The entrepreneur doesn't really respond primarily to the profit motive... entrepreneur and investor—are often not... the same person. Neither does the entrepreneur seek power... management and entrepreneur are not necessarily one. Nor do Veblenesque social status or Weberian Protestant righteousness seem to be the main motives... Rather, he seems to be the adventurer, a pioneer, an artist sculpting in economic clay. ...Is the dynamic force that sustains the industrialized economic system... an irrational spirit..? Many economists... postulate the existence of an "economic man," who rationally and objectively computes... and makes a decision that will maximize profits. ...[T]his imaginary construct is the dynamic implicitly assumed for almost all of the economic theories from the late 1800s to the present. ...[T]hey continue to use it because without economic man most of their theories would be invalidated."

"The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another, to turn up in his product."

"I’ve been blessed to know a lot of artists who are also mothers, who don’t necessarily go the cliché route of “motherhood ruins you.” It has always been more nuanced conversations, about the joy found in some aspects of parenting, how this perspective does and doesn’t inform creative life, and how one has a full community life as an artist even if one isn’t as a mother."

"The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by artists to prove that only a great artist can be a great technician. The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by technicians to prove that only a great technician can be a great artist."

"The Joker I now do what other people only dream. I make art until someone dies. See? I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist."

"To the artist, to the musician, is given the task of creating and expressing beauty--of sensitizing the souls of men."

"This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche’s conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who “enjoy” and “experience” it. That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche's teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): “Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman’s aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of ‘what is beautiful.’ In all philosophy to date the artist is missing.” Philosophy of art means “aesthetics” for Nietzsche too—but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard."

"If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed."

"Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with."

"I hope when artists write new characters, we invent new archetypes and they are visions of ways that we can be...What we need to do is to be able to imagine the possibility of a playful, peaceful, nurturing, mothering man, and we need to imagine the possibilities of a powerful, nonviolent woman and the possibilities of harmonious communities and if we can just imagine them, that would be the first step toward building them and becoming them."

"The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something."

"My job is to help the world..That is what an artist's job is—to the degree that we can. That is nothing more than holding up a mirror and saying, 'You're beautiful, baby.' Or holding up a mirror and saying, 'Look at the shit that you're doing to yourself. Maybe you should stop.' It is an artist's job to speak truth to power."

"there is some sense in which that lack of establishment approval is a blessing, for an artist must learn (the sooner the better) that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval, and it is easier to establish that sense of creative independence when approval is lacking than when one is seduced by it."

"... the primary obstacle for any artis: not piracy, but obscurity."

"The first major European development in mathematics occurred in the work of the artists. Imbued with the Greek doctrines that man must study himself and the real world, the artists began to paint reality... instead of interpreting religious themes in symbolic styles. They applied Euclidean geometry to create a new system of perspective... From the work of the artists, the mathematicians derived ideas and problems that led to a new branch of mathematics, ."

"Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both. Therefore the artist and the worker must unite to destroy Fascism. The Fascist artist is a traitor, the neutral is already dead. Art and anti-Fascism are synonymous."

"Dead he is not, but departed,—for the artist never dies."

"He's being irritating and irresponsible, but what do you expect? He's an artist."

"The authentic artist carries within himself another world to which the ordinary person has no access. The great value of the poet is that he enriches us with new, thoroughly experienced feelings, with unseen or differently seen landscapes."

"It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color — not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression."

"we are all supposed to become artists; that the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind. And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art-pedal to the floor, and understand that this is art—we are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western civilization, and, you know, it's been a C-minus performance so far … and they are just about to reach out with the hook and drag us offstage, unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously."

"We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world."

"This sudden importance of art—an importance discovered by ideological movements, by the State, and by the business world—has made the artist a central figure on the public place. His earlier revolt against society, his marginal role as an entertainer, have of course predestined him to the role of an ally of all progressive movements that promise a universal society, that is, a universal public for his books, poems, paintings and partitions. His shudder before the ugliness of capitalist civilization, his isolation from the masses whose warmth and understanding he genuinely needs, make him an ideal, because uncritical, partner of the progressive ideologues who preach the overthrow of all that he hates."

"The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration"

"There is one quality I find in all the artists I admire most - men like Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cezanne. I mean a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle of some sort."

"Revolution is not only won by numbers, but by visionaries, and if artists aren't visionaries, then we have no business doing what we do."

"The social outcome of the arts and crafts movement was not commensurate with the needs of the new situation; as Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out in his memorable speech at Hull House in 1908, the machine itself was as much an instrument of art, in the hands of an artist, as were the simple tools and utensils."

"A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist."

"It is an artist’s dream/goal to share their work with the world, and I have been blessed in that regard. I have enjoyed creating and sharing it all…(What advice do you have for young artists?) DO: Without hesitation, I would say just be yourself and let your imagination, thoughts, beliefs, views, visions — or whatever inspires you — be seen. Be vulnerable, and share what is inside you. Regardless of what medium you chose to create, open up and share your gift."

"The unknown shines through the productions of great artists in partially articulated form. The awe-inspiring ineffable begins to be realized but retains a terrifying abundance of its transcendent power. That is the role of art, and that is the role of artists. It is no wonder we keep their dangerous, magical productions locked up, framed, and apart from everything else."

"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, ears if he's a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he's a poet, or even, if he's a boxer, only some muscles? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, the passionate or pleasing events of the world, shaping himself completely in their image... No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy."

"In the twentieth century, modernism and postmodernism took over, and their practitioners disdained beauty as bourgeois, saccharine, lightweight. Art was deliberately made incomprehensible or ugly or shocking... on the assumption that our predilections... were reversible social constructions. This also led to an exaggeration of the dynamic of social status that has always been part of the arts. The elite arts used to be aligned with the economic and political aristocracy. They involved displays of sumptuosity and the flaunting of rare and precious skills that only the idle rich could cultivate. But now that any schmo could afford a Mozart CD or go to a free museum, artists had to figure out new ways to differentiate themselves from the rabble. So art became baffling and uninterpretable—unless you had some acquaintance with arcane theory."

"Without inspiration, without the Muses' enchantment, no artist, no matter how skilled they may be, can be considered a true artist."

"To express himself well, the artist should be hidden... The trouble is that if an artist knows he has genius, he's done for. The only salvation is to work like a labourer, and not have delusions of grandeur."

"The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination, will be the greatest!"

"Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions-not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire...poetry is always being created anew, in new places, by unforetold hands and voices. In this, it is like the many movements against demoralizing power. We don't know where either will come from. This is a story without an end."

"In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty."

"The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo. The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern-which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least an opinion consistent with his temperament. That being the case, he must maintain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved."

"In framing an artist, art hath thus decreed, To make some good, but others to exceed."

"Dead artists always bring out an older, richer crowd."

"It was Homer who gave laws to the artist."

"Kore-eda knows: A scared artist is a contradiction in terms; it betrays their vocation."

"Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards. These rewards are of exactly the same character as those of the artist. To see a difficult uncompromising material take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion, whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic. To see meaning and understanding come where there has been no meaning and no understanding is to share the work of a demiurge. No amount of technical correctness and no amount of labour can replace this creative moment, whether in the life of a mathematician or of a painter or musician. Bound up with it is a judgement of values, quite parallel to the judgement of values that belongs to the painter or the musician. Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognise this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician."

"Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all."

"For an artist there is no more serious and, at the same time, more joyous task than to create, through art, a new aesthetic, and ultimately, a new way of being."

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."

"The war [World War 1.] is founded on a glaring mistake, men have been confused with machines."

"It is a mistake to believe in my presence.. .If I take a seat at a party, I can see, even from afar, that only a ghost is sitting there."

"Our cabaret 'Cabaret Voltaire' is a gesture.. .Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect."

"We were all there when Janco arrived with his masks, and everyone immediately put one on. Then something strange happened. Not only did the mask immediately call for a costume; it also demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness. Although we could not have imagined it five minutes earlier we were walking around with most bizarre movements, festooned and draped with impossible objects, each one of us trying to outdo the other in inventiveness.. .What fascinated us all about the masks is that they represent not human characters and passions, but.. ..passions that are larger than life. The horror of our time [World War 1., a. o.], the paralyzing background of events, is made visible."

"I have invented [c. 1915-1916] a new series of verses, verses without words, or sound poems, in which the balancing of the vowels is gauged and distributed according to the value of the initial line.. .With these sound poems we should renounce language, devastated and made impossible by journalism. We should withdraw into the innermost alchemy of the word, and even surrender the word, thus conserving for poetry its most sacred domain. We should refuse to make poems second-hand; we should stop taking over words (not to mention sentences) which we did not invent entirely anew for our own use. We should no longer be content to achieve poetic effects which, in the final analysis, are but echoes of inspiration.."

"In these phonetic poems we the Dadaist artists totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word too, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge."

"We have now driven the plasticity of the word to the point where it can barely be surpassed.. .We have loaded the word with strengths and energies that have allowed us rediscover the evangelical concept of the 'word' (logos) as a magical complex image."

"I have examined myself carefully. I could never bid chaos welcome, blow up bridges, and do away with ideas. I am not an anarchist."

"Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means 'hobby horse'. In German it means 'good-bye', 'Get off my back', 'Be seeing you sometime'. In Romanian: 'Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right'. And so forth."

"An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets.. .Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also—poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza."

"How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada.."

"I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented.."

"It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language.. .Dada is the heart of words."

"Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness.. .The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance."

"gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen bluku terullala blaulala loooo"

"zimzim urullala zimzim urullala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata velo da bang band affalo purzamai affalo purzamai lengado tor gadjama bimbalo glandridi glassala zingtata pimpalo ögrögöööö viola laxato viola zimbrabim viola uli paluji malooo"

"tuffm im zimbrabim negramai bumbalo negramai bumbalo tuffm i zim gadjama bimbala oo beri gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen gaga di bling blong gaga blung"

"I am beginning to understand why renunciation has become sovereign in Germany, why an agony paralyses the spirits; why the few heads still living fall prey, partly to a fruitless aestheticism, partly to a fatal belief in evolution. Whether we will or not, we succumb to an overpowering system of profanation that is difficult to escape because there is barely any possibility of spiritual and material existence outside of it."

"All these poets are ascetics, monks and priests. They despise the flesh and all ballast. This world holds no enchantment for them.. .Poetry for them is the ultimate expression of the essence of things and thus is hymn and worship. Their poetry is one of divine names, of mysterious seals, and of spiritual extracts."

"That is the meaning of the coming of Christ.. ..that the word becomes flesh and man is saved from abstraction."

"It is true that for us art is not an end in itself, we have lost too many of our illusions for that. Art is for us an occasion for social criticism, and for real understanding of the age we live in.. .Dada was not a school of artists, but an alarm signal against declining values, routine and speculations, a desperate appeal, on behalf of all forms of art, for a creative basis on which to build a new and universal consciousness of art."

"For Ball, Dada represented the culmination of his revolt against external authority, and at the same time a means of breaking through the surface appearance to the realms of the spirit beyond. But Dada turned against him and threatened to destroy him."

"There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators.. .Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement."

"Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry.. .I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread demoralization wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to objective forces and the imagination of every individual."

"Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative... There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease"

"Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties... I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity... Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins... I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none."

"Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now.. . Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity:* Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere... Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE."

"To make a Dadaist Poem (1920) Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd."

"If I shout: Ideal, Ideal, Ideal Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge, Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the other magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have discussed in so many books."

"A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretensions is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant, and good-natured, it's always right, it's strong, vigorous and logical. Apropos of logic, I consider myself very likeable."

"Dada belongs to everybody."

"I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for children."

"Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions."

"Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks.."

"Men are different. It is diversity that makes life interesting. There is no common basis in mens minds. The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we could not reconstruct it."

"Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal minimum."

"You will often hear that Dada is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad, afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Dada. Without being literary, you can be romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny, transfigured, vain, amiable or Dada... Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its faults, with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views with indifference."

"We Dadaists are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent... There is no logic... The acts of life have no beginning and no end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada. Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes me as a boring kind of game... Like everything in life, Dada is useless... Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all of the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions."

"Perhaps we'll be able to do beautiful things, since I have a stellar, insane desire to assassinate beauty."

"Splendid, it has done me enormous good to finally see and read something in Switzerland that isn't bullshit. All of it is very nice, it is really something; your manifesto expresses every philosophy seeking truth, when there is no truth, only convention."

"Dada was founded in Zurich in the spring of 1916 by Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, w:Marcel Janco and w:Richard Huelsenbeck at the w:Cabaret Voltaire [in Zurich, Switzerland]... Through Tzara we were also in relation with the Futurist movement and carried on a correspondence with Marinetti. By that time Boccioni had been killed, but all of us knew his thick book, Pittura e scultuptura Futuriste. We regarded Marinetti's position as realistic, and were opposed to it, although we were glad to take over the concept of 'spontaneity', of which he made so much use. Tzara for the first time had poems recited simultaneously on the stage, and these performances were a great success, although the 'poeme simultane' had already been introduced in France by Dereme and others."

"In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the German w:Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: 'Dada is useless, like everything else in life... Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions.'"

"Tzara would draw slips of paper with words described on them from a hat, and present the resulting combination of words as a poem. [Hans] Arp allowed cut-outs of free or geometric shapes to arrange themselves in a random order, then pasted them on a surface and presented the result as a picture."

"The true foundation of all culture is the knowledge and understanding of water. Water is the ur-substance or ur-cause of all creation and for this reason is the ur-original accumulator, which readily absorbs both earthly and cosmic substances and conveys them to the body in a purely objective form. This must be done in such a way that the ur-attributes will in no way be modified and that change as such can only first come about in the effect, which the organically correctly structured body mediates and imparts. For this reason a good spirit dwells in a healthy body. Conversely a body full of vitality can be created, maintained and further developed by healing the inhering spirit."

"Even in earliest youth my fondest desire was to understand Nature, and thus to come closer to the truth; a truth that I was unable to discover either at school or in church."

"Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is properly done it brings happiness, and when carried out incorrectly it assuredly brings misery. Humanity! Your will is paramount! You can command Nature if you but obey her!"

"It is possible to regulate watercourses over any given distance without embankment works; to transport timber and other materials, even when heavier than water, for example ore, stones, etc., down the centre of such water-courses; to raise the height of the water table in the surrounding countryside and to endow the water with all those elements necessary for the prevailing vegetation. Furthermore it is possible in this way to render timber and other such materials non-inflammable and rot resistant; to produce drinking and spa-water for man, beast and soil of any desired composition and performance artificially, but in the way that it occurs in Nature; to raise water in a vertical pipe without pumping devices; to produce any amount of electricity and radiant energy almost without cost; to raise soil quality and to heal cancer, tuberculosis and a variety of nervous disorders... the practical implementation of this … would without doubt signify a complete reorientation in all areas of science and technology. By application of these new found laws, I have already constructed fairly large installations in the spheres of log-rafting and river regulation, which as is known, have functioned faultlessly for a decade, and which today still present insoluble enigmas to the various scientific disciplines concerned."

"This civilization is the work of man, who high-handedly and ignorant of the true workings of Nature, has created a world without meaning or foundation, which now threatens to destroy him, for through his behavior and his activities, he, who should be her master, has disturbed Nature's inherent unity."

"The Upholder of the Cycles which supports the whole of Life, is water. In every drop of water dwells the Godhead, whom we all serve; there also dwells Life, the Soul of the "First" substance - Water - whose boundaries and banks are the capillaries that guide it and in which it circulates. More energy is encapsulated in every drop of good spring water than an average-sized PowerStation is presently able to produce."

"Our primeval Mother Earth is an organism that no science in the world can rationalize. Everything on her that crawls and flies is dependent upon Her and all must hopelessly perish if that Earth dies that feeds us."

"Thus the development of micro-organisms and the opportunities for their propagation are simply a result of the condition in which the respective sickening macro-organism finds itself, which will be attacked by these parasites and which eventually must fall victim to them if its inner climatic conditions are no longer strictly regulated."

"To Be or Not to Be: In Nature all life is a question of the minutest, but extremely precisely graduated differences in the particular thermal motion within every single body, which continually changes in rhythm with the processes of pulsation. This unique law, which manifests itself throughout Nature's vastness and unity and expresses itself in every creature and organism, is the ' law of ceaseless cycles' that in every organism is linked to a certain time span and a particular tempo. The slightest disturbance of this harmony can lead to the most disastrous consequences for the major life forms. In order to preserve this state of equilibrium, it is vital that the characteristic inner temperature of each of the millions of micro-organisms contained in the macro-organisms be maintained."

"Wherever we look the dreadful disintegration of the bridges of life, the capillaries and the bodies they have created, is evident, which has been caused by the mechanical and mindless work of man, who has torn away the soul from the Earth's blood - water. The more the engineer endeavors to channel water, of whose spirit and nature he is today still ignorant, by the shortest and straightest route to the sea, the more the flow of water weighs into the bends, the longer its path and the worse the water will become. The spreading of the most terrible disease of all, of cancer, is the necessary consequence of such unnatural regulatory works. These mistaken activities—our work—must legitimately lead to increasingly widespread unemployment, because our present methods of working, which have a purely mechanical basis, are already destroying not only all of wise Nature's formative processes, but first and foremost the growth of the vegetation itself, which is being destroyed even as it grows. The drying up of mountain springs, the change in the whole pattern of motion of the groundwater, and the disturbance in the blood circulation of the organism—Earth—is the direct result of modern forestry practices. The pulse-beat of the Earth was factually arrested by the modern timber production industry. Every economic death of a people is always preceded by the death of its forests. The forest is the habitat of water and as such the habitat of life processes too, whose quality declines as the organic development of the forest is disturbed. Ultimately, due to a law which functions with awesome constancy, it will slowly but surely come around to our turn. Our accustomed way of thinking in many ways, and perhaps even without exception, is opposed to the true workings of Nature. Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is carried out correctly, it brings happiness, but when carried out incorrectly, it assuredly brings misery."

"The revelation of the secret of water will put an end to all manner of speculation or expediency and their excrescences, to which belong war, hatred, impatience and discord of every kind. The thorough study of water therefore signifies the end of monopolies, the end of all domination in the truest sense of the word and the start of a socialism arising from the development of individualism in its most perfect form."

"Everything is governed by one law. A human being is a microcosmos, i.e. the laws prevailing in the cosmos also operate in the minutest space of the human being."

"You must look at the processes of motion in the macrocosmos and microcosmos accurately, and copy them!"

"I must furnish those, who would protect or save life, with an energy source, which produces energy so cheaply that nuclear fission will not only be uneconomical, but ridiculous. This is the task I have set myself in what little life I have left."

"I think it would have been much better if Newton had contemplated how the apple got up there in the first place!"

"In every case do the opposite to whatever technology does today. Then you will always be on the right track."

"If I am a fool then it is no misfortune, for then only one more fool will wander this Earth. Amongst the millions of mentally deranged it would barely be noticed. But what if I am not a fool, and that science itself has erred? Then the tragedy is incalculable!"

"What is the present outlook in the field of energy generation? One word suffices - catastrophic! Through over-illumination and overheating of the media of earth, water and air in Nature's household, a short circuit - 'cold fire' - and the development of cancer has been triggered off. With a conflagration was kindled, whose ashes and slag residues alone will extinguish all life. Thus a reporter stated recently, "For the time being this radiating thing is there and with it the attendant worries as to how we can protect ourselves against these lethal rays, which penetrate even the thickest lead shields." The sheer lunacy of using nuclear power for peaceful purposes will be just as short-lived as the subsequent remorse will be long."

"All motion consists of two components. One component serves inwardness (internalisation) and the other outwardness (dispersion). Both preconditions for motion regulate the eternal flow of metamorphosis (panta Rhei)."

"The inner climate stamps each individual with its character. Every life-form has its own individual anomaly point of health, which makes the orderly reproduction of the species possible. This also explains why the world of parasites increases with fever."

"Implosion is no invention in the conventional sense, but rather the renaissance of ancient knowledge, lost over the course of time."

"I can generate suctional forces, which act indirectly and are entirely undetectable. No current of air can be noticed; only an almost imperceptible cooling, as occurs when air is sucked in strongly with the back of the hand held in front of the mouth. It is therefore incorrect to say that I have copied the cyclones and typhoons of the tropics."

"You must learn to think one octave higher. Only then will you learn how implosion energy works."

"If we wish to influence our own life in a particular direction, which is constantly threatened by the danger of the emergence of alien life-forms, and protect it from deterioration, then we must either allow Nature to rule or, if we wish to intervene, we must first acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of life."

"Whoever accelerates the media of earth, water and air centrifugally perishes unconditionally, for in so doing they reduce the Blood of the Earth (water) to a pathogenic state and make it the most dangerous enemy of all living and growing things."

"It has been proven psychologically that human beings can only appreciate or apprise, i.e. comprehend and understand, something new, if they can succeed in raising up the subconscious immured in their brain cells into their higher consciousness. If this cannot be achieved, then all preaching is useless. And even the eye has first to learn how to see everything new; it too must therefore be awoken from its latency before it can grasp the seen. Above all, there must be readiness to consider even supposed wonders as the forerunners of forthcoming realities, for only thus can the foundations be laid upon which rational mind can calculate and analyse."

"We must look into unknown dimensions, into Nature, into that incalculable and imponderable life, whose carrier and mediator, the blood of the Earth that accompanies us steadfastly from the cradle to the grave, is water."

"As best demonstrated by Nature in the case of the aerofoil maple-seed, today's propeller is a pressure-screw and therefore a braking screw, whose purpose is to allow the heavy maple-seed to fall parachute-like slowly towards the ground and to be carried away sideways by the wind in the process. No bird has such a whirling thing on its head, nor a fish on its tail. Only man made use of this natural brake-screw for forward propulsion. As the propeller rotates, so does the resistance rise by the square of the rotational velocity. This is also a sign that this supposed propulsive device is unnaturally constructed and therefore out of place."

"Equivalence signifies uniformity and thus immobility."

"The scientist states that pressure is exerted outwards in all directions equally, whereas natural pressure (e.g. air pressure) is exerted inwards from all directions equally."

"We need no science of formulae, but a science of forms."

"They call me deranged. The hope is that they are right! It is of no greater or lesser import for yet another fool to wander this Earth. But if I am right and science is wrong, then may the Lord God have mercy on mankind!"

"Herr Reich Chancellor, present-day science is following a wrong and dangerous path. First and foremost it concerns the treatment of water - the principal agent of life. The existing methods of water control, power stations and forestry are ruining water - the earth's blood. It becomes diseased, and so affects all its surroundings. Instead of progress, the future promises catastrophe. With your four-year plan, and the technological methods employed, you are demolishing Germany, instead of building her up. In this way, Germany will sink within ten years.."

"From my observations I noted how an increased water level resulting from a thaw builds up mud banks, which are then partially dispersed during clear cool nights when the water temperature drops. I then waited for an increase in the strength of the water current. This takes place in the early hours of the morning, when it is coolest, and particularly during full moon, in spite of the fact that the actual volume of the water is then apparently less, because of its contraction through cooling. I arranged for the timber to enter the water at the right moment, and in one single night 1600 cubic metres of timber were all brought down to a temporarily constructed pond in the valley."

"Far back in history, there is evidence that men who have attempted to solve the riddle of water have been bitterly attacked. Every attempt to explain the nature of water in old books has been demolished in the later editions. In any case, maintaining the sense of mystery about water ensures the prosperity of the capital intensive economy, for financial interest thrives only on a defective economy. If the riddle surrounding the origins of water were solved, it would be possible to make as much pure water available as required at any location; in this way vast areas of desert would become fertile. As a consequence, the selling values of the produce would sink so low that there would be no more incentive to speculate, or to develop agricultural machinery. The concept of unrestricted production and cheap machine power is so revolutionary, that the way of life all over the world would experience a change. Maintaining the mystery of water, therefore, maintains the value of capital, so every attempt to come nearer to an explanation is attacked."

"Actually, the mysteries of water are similar to those of the blood in the human body. In Nature, normal functions are fulfilled by water just as blood provides many important functions for mankind."

"Natural phenomena undisturbed by man point the way to the realization of a new technique. One needs a keen sense of observation. We must understand Nature before we can adapt its way of working to our needs."

"Naturally moving water augments itself. It improves its quality and matures considerably. Its boiling and freezing points change, and wise Nature makes use of this phenomenon to raise water, without using pumping equipment, to the highest mountain peaks, to appear as mountain springs. This conception of raising water is not to be taken literally, since in this context it is concerned with the natural process of propagation and purification. This in turn helps towards the expansion of air by creating an air cover, which serves to develop a higher form of life."

"A healthy forest, untouched by forestry technology, is made up of a strange mixture of vegetation. Alongside well-defined areas of noble trees, conditions of apparent chaos can be found, which can best be described as irregular confusion. People who are not aware of the importance of the balance in Nature, of which the forest is a part, want to clear areas of everything they do not consider to be useful. A great deal of sensitive concern and observation is necessary to begin to understand why Nature depends on an apparently chaotic disorder."

"The damage caused by modern forest technology is so devastating, because this energy interchange cannot evolve as it does in a natural forest. When there is a variety of tree types and undergrowth, energy is created in the whole forest area."

"Each green leaf or each needle is in effect a remarkably well-regulated metal factory. Its operation can be demonstrated experimentally. With the falling of the leaves or needles this supply of metals is scattered by the wind, and the more undergrowth there is, the greater is the dispersion of organic metal salts, which during the winter are pressed down hard by the snow."

"...As time passed I began to play a game with water's secret powers; I surrendered my so-called free consciousness and allowed the water to take possession of it for a while. Little by little this game turned into a profoundly earnest endeavour, because I realised that one could detach one's own consciousness from the body and attach it to that of the water. When my own consciousness was eventually returned to me, then the water's most deeply concealed psyche often revealed the most extraordinary things to me. As a result of this investigation, a researcher was born who could dispatch his consciousness on a voyage of discovery, as it were. In this way I was able to experience things that had escaped other people's notice, because they were unaware that a human being is able to send forth his free consciousness into those places the eyes cannot see. By practising this blindfolded vision, I eventually developed a bond with mysterious Nature, whose essential being I then slowly learnt to perceive and understand..."

"The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound. This is incorrect. What is hard to understand is what is immature, unclear and often false. The highest wisdom is simple and passes through the brain directly to the heart."

"For a person who lives 100 years in the future, the present comes as no surprise."

"How else should it be done then?", was always the immediate question. The answer is simple: "Exactly in the opposite way that it is done today!"

"Science views the blood-building and character-influencing ur-organism "water" merely as a chemical compound and provides millions of people with a liquid prepared from this point of view, which is everything but healthy water."

"Is it therefore so illogical to recognise the Will of Nature in the rapid increase in the number of human beings? Surely several hundred million more people are needed, who with their energy and strength can help restore this ravished lump of excrement, the Earth, to its former glory!"

"Whoever exploits retrograde oxidising processes must inevitably inaugurate a scarcity and shortage of food, raw materials and fuels"

""Unfortunately, catastrophes or scandalous disclosures always have to happen before humanity realises that it is only its own mistakes that have led it into misfortune. These are all the more difficult to rectify, because in the main they have been made by the authorities, who will not commit suicide themselves, but in order to save their own skins, they would rather that all Life should perish before they acknowledge their errors.'"

"The essential nature of growth is none other than the overcoming of earthly weight."

"Nothing falls entirely! Nothing dies away completely! Nothing can totally deprive another of its rights! On the contrary, the deeper the fall, the higher the reactive upswing!"

"Water is a living organism!"

"My dear friends! We move everything back to front. What we are doing is wrong and contrary to Nature. Nature moves in other ways. She primarily employs drawing, i.e. sucking energies, since these are indispensable to Nature for the growth and maintenance of life. Nature uses pressure energies and explosive forces only for reducing quality and destruction. Atomic physicists also work upside down. They would be more correct if they started with simple nuclear fusion. They should set about the cold transformation of hydrogen into helium, as Nature has done over the millions of years of Creation. Today's technology has a tiger by the tail, because it splits the heaviest atoms with the greatest development of heat and an enormous expenditure of energy."

"It is important for human beings and animals to drink healthy water. Chemically purified water, chlorinated or ozonated water is no longer living and healthy water. Good water, full of life and rich in energy, is synonymous with strong and healthy life. Bad water is synonymous with sick life. No water is the same as no life."

"How can it be easy to understand Father Schauberger's language—his work belongs to the future."

"You may have lived a calm and contented life—but from the moment you come face to face with the ideas of Viktor Schauberger, you will never again have peace in your soul."

"Viktor Schauberger's early appreciation of the intimate relationship between water and forest, and their dual influence upon water resource management, the landscape's health within particular precipitation areas—is undoubtedly correct. ...Schauberger's theories about Europe are, in the tropics, ...verified in a convincing and shocking way. We, in the temperate regions will, in the long run, experience similar damage... if harmful ecological measures are allowed to continue..."

"This is not the place to discuss the validity of his theories... only a small number of them have been able to be tested. ...[I]f his central theme is correct... this embodies a revolutionary discovery of crucial importance. ...Schauberger wished to make practical use of nature's reconstituting principle of 'cycloidal spiral motion' ...However his theories may be regarded, ...he was a great friend of Nature and a man with original, grandiose and often revolutionary ideas. Many have been moved by his ideas about Nature and his philosophy of life..."

"Water was his consuming interest. He set out to discover its laws and characteristics and the connection between its temperature and its motion. He noticed how water running from a mountain stream was at its greatest density, the so-called 'anomaly point' of +4°C, and [apparently] at its highest quality. Salmon and trout, during spawning, drive themselves towards these sources, and he found the richest... vegetation in these spots."

"He... became interested in the behaviour of trout and salmon in mountain streams. The... trout could lie motionless... in the strongest current. ...He ...organized his woodsmen to warm up about 100 litres of water and pour this in ...upstream ...The meagre 100 litres ...did not noticeably warm up the stream. However, ...the trout ...until then ...motionless ...was only with considerable effort able to maintain its position. This convinced Schauberger... that there was ...a connection between the water's temperature and the trout's behaviour. ...[A]lso ...the trout's ability to jump up high waterfalls with little apparent effort. ...[H]e saw evidence for his theory that the trout exploited some hitherto unknown source of energy within the water."

"Viktor Schauberger has observed water and seen and recorded more than all the scientific instruments put together so far."

"[T]he Upper Austrian forester, naturalist and natural philosopher, Viktor Schauberger... is without a doubt one of the most fascinating figures of this century."

"His fundamental realization was that hydrologists (with the exception of a small group he was... able to convince) do everything backwards."

"Schauberger... arrived at the opinion that the "explosion technology"... of burning and destroying, is... wrong and... in contradiction to nature. He opposed... internal combustion engines, "the fire-breathing monsters," with that of the power of "implosion." ...[I]nternal combustion worked centrifugally, destructively and detrimentally to life, it changed natural products of high quality ...as coal and oil into waste products ...which place an enormous burden on the environment and... will ...lead to its destruction. ...Nature ...only uses disintegrating forces to decompose sick, weak or unviable elements, in the form of spoilage and decay... the starting point for the development of new, more important life. In burning and combustion, this "sacred principle" is interrupted... In contrast... implosion is ...product refinement ...material ...is transformed into something of greater worth. ..."Nothing explodes in a plant," said ...Schauberger."

"Contrary to centrifugal explosion, implosion works inwards, towards the center, centripetally. It concentrates the power towards the center where it... becomes... strongest. ...In the water, the wind, in the sap... and in the blood... movement ...take[s] ...an implosive [course] ...concentrating itself at the center. Bodies of water left to flow naturally turn within themselves, make winding movements that breathe and shelter life. They... regenerate waste water... and... revitalize it. And in the whirlwind... spiral motion is present with a vacuum and low temperatures in the inmost core. The same system is seen in... the universe as spiral nebula. Schauberger recognized this principle while observing in water."

"He tries to explain the puzzle of how a trout can make a standing jump several meters high against the enormous force of a waterfall. His conclusion: the spiraling free-falling water... creates a wake at the center. The trout searches out this counter-current... the mass of the falling water opens... a gap for a fraction of a second, it slips through and, sucked up the center by the countercurrent... is thrown up... This makes it easy to visualize the inner energy... in... clouds... wind and the water. Birds behave... much like trout..."

"[I]t seems timely that the radical departure in energy concepts presented here, should be available now, when the tide of human development is turning and the impetus of this renewing flood can be harnessed to launch Viktor Schauberger's pioneering discoveries into a world more ready than ever it implement them. At a time also, when the activities of humanity are increasingly seen to be on a head-on collision course with Nature's processes."

"We have never... thought to question the influence that continual exposure to unnatural straight lines may exert on our mental, intellectual and emotional processes, on the energies that motivate and animate us and cause us to behave... Such is the desensitizing effect that we will perhaps have to change our living spaces in order to make possible the leap to the next higher state of awareness, to be able to appreciate Nature's processes and attune ourselves to them. No doubt it was for all of these reasons the Viktor Schauberger so joyfully declared: "In the whole machine there is no straight line or circle". By this he meant that the overall design and shape of his devices were founded on completely different parameters to those of current design. Gone are the mortifying elements of Euclid. ...[T]hese machines incorporate the swirling spirals and sinuosities, the open elements of non-Euclidean geometry so prevalent in Nature."

"Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul."

"The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain."

"I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

"I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars."

"You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart."

"Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life."

"Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand when the sunrise brightens the river's memory and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound. Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens over its lost name, when the hunched island was called 'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned, its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries, that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees. These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space for a single God where the old gods stood before, The first god was a gommier. The generator began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw, sent the chips flying like mackrel over water into trembling weeds"

"No masterpieces in huge frames to worship, … and yet there are the days when every street corner rounds itself into a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase, canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue, the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise."

"Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic."

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."

"I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style."

"you can't separate your growth from your soil. (1968)"

"I don't read poetry for pleasure. I read to be terrified in a way. And people who terrify me from their size and the grandeur of their imagination now are people like Pasternak and Neruda, a lot of Latin-American poets, Lowell - very few English poets - Ted Hughes a little...very few English poets now in fact (1968)"

"I have always believed in fierce, devoted apprenticeship... I have always tried to keep my mind Gothic in its devotions to the concept of master and apprentice. The old masters made new masters by the discipline of severity. One's own voice is an anthology of all the sounds one has heard. As it is with children, so with poets. (1983)"

"I do not consider English to be the language of my masters. I consider language to be my birthright. I happen to have been born in an English and a Creole place, and love both languages. It is the passion, futility and industry of critics to perpetuate this ambiguity. It is their profession. It is mine to do what other poets before me did, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Burns, which is to fuse the noble and the common language, the streets and the law courts, in a tone that is true to my own voice, in which both accents are heard naturally. (1983)"

"I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who believes in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be fascist. (1987)"

"People who are offering revenge, they are just an enemy. But when you offer peace and love, that infuriates people. And you get killed for that. That's why Christ is killed, that's why King is shot, that's why Gandhi is killed. The idea of a man believing in the universal brotherhood is totally unendurable to someone who would prefer to have that man talk about revenge. (1990)"

"The Caribbean creativity is phenomenal. It is an astonishing phenomenon. The kind of writing that has been produced in these islands is such elaborate work. It was inevitable historically and culturally. But it is still as astonishing. Now you're talking about writers of equality, of Jean Rhys, Saint-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, V. S. Naipaul. And these people are different colors and different races. (1990)"

"I love the opulent poetry of Tishani Doshi and the more formal work of Derek Walcott and Christian Wiman."

"...a master wordsmith. These words are his, from his poem "The Schooner Flight": I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation... Doesn't that last line just fucking give you chills, coming hard on the heels of what preceded it? Goddamn. Much respect."

"I like the magic that operates in many of Derek's plays, the lushness and the exquisite wordcraft of them, and the fact that he uses Creole and music."

"...no matter how you look at Walcott, Walcott is a major figure; he is a Miltonic figure, a Shakespearean figure, a Chaucer figure. He stands in Caribbean literature like those figures: Chaucer, maybe Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton-those major, major massive figures who have already covered generations of work. And others come along who have their own value, their own work, but these guys have always already done more than anybody else. You look into the past, they've already done the past; you look into the future, they've already done things in the future. So he's a significant poet because he is the major poet, in terms of form and style, concerns, themes, and so on. And I very much look to him for form and so on. In terms of the ideology and the content, as I say, I think there is certainly a difference, as I move more and more into Christian poetry. You couldn't really describe Walcott as a Christian poet - not in that strict sense of the term. Our concerns have been independence, how we deal with the politics of the situation and so on...He has done his work and I think those of us coming after have to do our own work. We can't repeat him. We should not. We should learn from him and move on."

"Honor your humanness and all of your feelings - the messy ones, the growing pains, the ache - because we can't have the dark without the light."

"The more I look around and listen I realize that I'm not alone. We are all facing choices that define us. No choice. However messy is without importance in the overall picture of our lives. We all at our own age have to claim something, even if it's only our own confusion. I am in the middle of growing up and into myself."

"I think God leaves me alone to let me find my own strength because no one else can give it to me. Sometimes it is very lonely. But I know the lonely times teach me the most. I must let go in order to let anything in. No one can love me, for me. Take a big walk protected in the trees. I miss the time before today."

"What we don't let out traps us. We think, "No one else feels this way, I must be crazy." So we don't say anything. And we become enveloped by a deep loneliness, not knowing where our feelings come from or what to do with them. "Why do I feel this way? Last week, I was on top of the world and now my feelings don't make sense." Voicing it, getting it out and letting it other people hear it, helps to dissipate it. The fears and self-criticisms begin to leak. And we begin to heal."

"May Sarton said, "the deeper you go, the more universal you become." It's a reminder to me that those things I try to convince myself I don't need to admit are usually those things I need the most to say. Speaking the truth, in its most poignant details, is liberating and gives those around us the freedom to be real."

"Art is something given, not reproduced... the painter paints what he sees with his innermost senses, the expression of his being.. every other impression becomes, for him, an inner expression."

"If I had not grown up in Stockerau, in the boonies of Lower Austria, than I would not be what I am now. The germ cell of burgeoning nerdism is difference. The yearning to be understood, to find opportunities to share experiences, to not be left alone with one's bizarre interest. At the same time one derives an almost perverse pleasure from wallowing in this deficit. Nerds love deficiency: that of the other, but also their own. Nerds are eager explorers, who enjoy measuring themselves against one another and also compete aggressively. And yet the nerd's existence also comprises an element of the occult, of mystery. The way in which this power is expressed or focused is very important."

"Historically speaking, the first wave of the punk/new wave (approximately 1976-1983) was primarily a movement of creative abuse of hardly-ever-used consumer media technology. Parents (usually technophile Baby boomer dads) bought expensive equipment like 8-track recorders, Super-8 and Polaroid cameras and later VHS camcorders and only used it to "document" birthday parties and other eminently boring ceremonies. But the rebellious teens found interesting new things to do with the dust-collecting media tech, and it started one of the biggest DIY revolutions of the 20th century. So punk (years before cyperpunk) was a movement of youngsters goofing around with (aka appropriating) consumer tech."

"I think that the figure of the nerd provides a beautiful template for analyzing the transformation of the disciplinary society into the control society. The nerd, in his cliche form, first stepped out upon the world stage in the mid-1970s, when we were beginning to hear the first rumblings of what would become the Cambrian explosion of the information society. The nerd must serve as comic relief for the future-anxieties of Western society. And the transformation I'm talking about is already in full swing: the police gaze of 19th- and 20th-century disciplinary society made visible the individual, which is illuminated by power. In our burgeoning technological control society, the individual is x-rayed and algorithmized. Even worse: the individuals x-ray themselves, willingly putting themselves on display."

"Jesus died for our SIMMs."

"Privacy is a bourgeois fantasy."

"The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed."

"In a media-based society (and of course there is no such thing as a non-media-based society consisting of more than one person) it is the signs and significants, the meanings and habits and conventions of speaking and thinking, the images and stereotypes which control everything. It is important to analyze how it is represented and of course what is not represented or how it lacks representation. It's not so much Rupert Murdoch – whose assholeness I will not dispute – that we should attack, but rather something I would call the cultural grammar of the public space. Power is formed within such a grammar. Access and non-access to each and every thing is regulated in its realm. Meanings are negotiated there."

"The human is a narrative being. We construct emotional machines, so-called “stories”, to communicate, to share the world in which we live and make it collectively experienceable. And we are pretty good at doing that. Since the primordial soup at some point mendelized into primate brains, we have either been fleeing from big cats or telling others about our escapes from the clutches of big cats. Sitting around the campfire, interpreting and breaking down the world, charging it with aura. Initially this was all very mythopoeic, and slowly it became more differentiated. But even in the post-Enlightenment age, world interpretations are not necessarily particularly rational. Good stories sell well, and the best stories are the ones that hit you in the gut, regardless of whether they would hold up to a Wikipedia check or not."

"Oh, Tolkien, that miserable Catholic. He even hated refrigerators. A technophobic academic who probable would have fucked Ireland, if Ireland were fuckable."

"Companies like Nike already use Graffiti as a standard variety in their marketing campaigns and the first people who read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' were marketing gurus who wanted to know what they shouldn't do."

"Since the advent of modernism, artists have been seeking to loosen the entanglement of work and subject, because they saw themselves pushed into a role that they did not necessarily want to occupy: one which offered freedom and independence on the upside, but in combination with isolation and powerlessness on the downside. While the workers of the Fordist factory developed collectivist strategies to pursue their goals, the particularities of the artist's existence – cast as productive eccentricity and manic-depressive individualism – made it more difficult for artists to organize to achieve their demands and improve their precarious living and working conditions. It was only with great difficulty that this group, condemned to autonomy, could free itself from the prison of its freedom."

"The information age is an age of permanently getting stuck. Greater and greater speed is demanded. New software, new hardware, new structures, new cultural techniques. Life-long learning? Yes. But the company can't fire the secretary every six months, just because she can't cope with the new version of Excel. They can count their keystrokes, measure their productivity … but! They will never be able to sanction their inability! Because that is immanent."

"I think that Man in creating God somewhat overestimated his abilities."

"Imagination is an abuse of power."

"The great gender unifier is your asshole."

"Computer games are embedded in the cultural framework of technological developments. In the study of technological development and creativity, focusing attention on the failure, the error, the breakdown, the malfunction means opening the black box of technology. Studies have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over." However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed. According to Langdon Winner, there is a sense in which all technical activity contains an inherent tendency toward forgetfulness."

"Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well... the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter."

"I always wonder what the official web site of the GDR would look like if they were still around. Would they use Flash? Or HTML5?"

"The future is like the Jetsons, plus rape."

"Long time ago I called the greasy stuff on touch displays "hackerfat"... but it's better to change that to "socialsmear"."

"I blame society for Zack Snyder's career."

"The Capitalist system is a highly adaptable entity. And so it isn't surprising that alternative spaces and forms of living provided interesting ideas that could be milked and marketed. So certain structural features of these "indie" movement outputs were suddenly highly acclaimed, applied and copy-pasted into capitalist developing laboratories. These qualities fit best into the tendency in which -- by the end of the seventies -- bourgeois society started to update and re-launch using the experiences gained through countercultural projects. Mainstream harvested the knowledge that was won in these projects and used it. Normalizing dissent."

"The emergence of new media (and therefore artistic) formats is certainly interesting. But etching information into copper plates is just as exciting. We think that the perpetual return of 'the new', to cite Walter Benjamin, is nothing to write home about - except perhaps for the slave-drivers in the fashion industry. We've never been interested in the new just in itself, but in the accidental occurrence. In the moment where things don't tally, where productive confusion arises. That's why in the final analysis, although we've laughed a lot with Stewart Home, we even reject the meta-criticism of innovation-fixation articulated in 'neoism'. The new sorts itself out when it lands in the museum. Finito."

"I always loved the grand dichotomies of life. Dogs and cats. Cats and mice. Like Tom and Jerry. But as someone who grew up in Central Europe I never understood how a mouse can live inside a wall. Walls are made of bricks! They are not hollow. Way later I came to understand, when I learned that US-American houses are just made of wood, and their walls are really hollow."

"Christianity is a death cult gone horribly wrong."

"Everything in German sounds like a war crime. And everything in Austrian German sounds like a war crime served with whipped cream."

"Hasta la victoria siempre! Never forget! And let anthropomorphized kiwis puke evil provitamins on Jean-Luc Picard!"

"Did you know that if you removed all nerve cells from your brain and laid them out end-to-end in a straight line, you would die?"

"Whenever I go to a botanical garden, I think of killing people with a spade."

"Monotheism is a dictatorship. The number of the beast is 1."

"Vegas is gorgeous hyperreality, but most of the stuff people like here is not my cup of tea. I don't gamble, and I don't like Penn & Teller. I'd rather be locked into a basement full of Philip Glass recordings."

"Liberals believe being friendly and fair will make the world better. But our world runs by horrific rules. Fair-play doesn't change the rules. You just accept them."

"A guy once screamed "Rammstein is fascist" in my face. I screamed "Laibach have seen better days!" back."

"Watching a Norwegian film: character screams "Satan" and the English subtitle reads "Christ". That's was I call subliminal messaging."

"Strange to see radical anti-Semites using Facebook. I'd like to call that Zuckerberg's Paradox."

"Mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. So it's never old news to deal with the intersection of human desire and ingenuity. As biohacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and the plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, we explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer."

"Rammstein is an award-winning music-based German-teaching system for American goths."

"Dreamt I had a meeting with the Austrian Film Institute about a grant. They told me I would never get one, but I should try insurance fraud."

"I remember when I got a new device for my computer. I connected it to the landline phone plug(!), and the device called another device and sang a robot love song to it. That made the devices connect, and I could go online and exchange messages. That was one of the most important things that ever happened to me, breaking my isolation. It helped me to reach out to other folks all around the globe. Communication is key in nerd culture. But beware if that communication fails. You can create toxic troll wastelands! Not even robot love songs can help you with that!"

"There are still films about bank robberies, but let's be honest, the biggest financial crimes today aren't happening in banks, they're happening on Wall Street. This is happening in the completely abstract datasphere. Capitalism is dependent upon this commodity of speed. Making a film about a bank robbery is maybe funny, but it's completely anachronistic. We have to tell the stories of the 21st century, specifically in a way that people can relate to it."

"Leftist memes are 25 pages long and have footnotes. (Original German: Linke Memes sind 25 Seiten lang und haben Fußnoten.)"

"[Glossary of Broken Dreams] was born out of the frustration that debate culture (not only) on digital platforms has become radically fragmented and fractalized, making it hard to call it discourse. It's a Tower of Babel-like context confusion that pleases me as a nerd, but as a political being who wants society to progress, it doesn't please me at all. [...] I just thought it was time for something like a political spring cleaning of concepts. Because picking up the broom and taking a chance to get rid of stuff is the only way to prevent us all from becoming social liberal hoarders. One of my examples is the concept of privacy that, at the moment, everyone coddles like a puppy. Let me say this, as a good old Neo-leftist, I'm having problems with the conservative and deeply bourgeois can of worms that the privacy debate entails. I think it's time to change our thought patterns here. Instead of trying to find ways to defend our privacy come hell or high water, we should ask ourselves why privacy is such a major concern for us? Is what we're trying to achieve here just reformist symptom-control rather than a solution to the underlying problems?"

"It's not working from home, it's living at work."

"Conspiracy theories (actually: hypotheses) are comforting, anthropocentric, affirming constructs. They assume that someone runs the world, that someone is in control. The sad truth is that nobody is in control. That's way more terrifying."

"My nerdy teenage rebellion was to confront my parents with the scientific method, challenging their weird beliefs, asking for peer-reviewed data and scientific context. I remember that one day when I was 15, I asked my mother to use her divining rod and a piece of paper to determine the first 30 decimal values of pi. It took her three hours and not a single one was right. That felt like a huge success, but she just told me she had a bad day because of the full moon. Tomorrow she would try again and would succeed. And if not, who says that the 30 digits of pi in the math books are actually right? Maybe her version was correct in the first place and she had access to a higher knowledge? It simply wasn't possible to challenge her."

"Sometimes I surprise myself with my own face."

"Don't cry for me, cry for Argentina!"

"After the Soviet Union turned into many, many little non-Soviet countries... it was crazy. It was like a lot of pop-ups on Firefox, and you try to click them away, but it doesn't work!"

"Is Corona laboratory-made? Nah. I think it's way more reasonable to assume that a bat fucked a pangolin. And some guy then fucked that pangolin. Mystery solved. Occam's razor."

"Ars sana in corpore sano. (Healthy art in a healthy body.)"

"I love colors...as much as I love concepts."

"Istanbul these days has as much dynamism as New York."

"Ich bin das erste lebende kunst museum."

"Art shouldn’t be only the aesthetics we hang on the wall, but a dynamic to shape the society."

"Today the term “global” can no longer constitute a serious topic for an in depth intellectual discussion because it simply means “Camerica”."

"Even if the world ends, the Music will still survive....Music has no caste."

"Music lets me forget bad experiences. You cannot keep ragas and regrets in your mind together."

"After a year and half Mamu told me if you see anything don’t talk about it. One night I was playing deep in meditation. I smelled something. It was an indescribable scent, something like sandalwood and jasmine. I thought it was the aroma of Ganges but the scent got more powerful. When I opened my eyes , there was Balaji standing right next to me, exactly as he is pictured. My door was locked from inside; nobody was allowed to enter when I did riyaz. He said ‘play my son’ but I was sweating. I stopped playing."

"If music is bad then why has it reached such heights? Why does music make me to soar towards heaven? The religion of music is one; all other are different. I tell the Mullas that this is the only haqeeqat (reality). This is my world. My Namaaz is the seven ‘sudh’ [pure] and five ‘komal’ [soft] surs."

"Allahee...Allah-hee... Allah-hee....I continued to raise the pitch. When I opened my eyes I asked them: Is this madness? I am calling the God. I am thinking of him. I am searching for Him. Why do you call my search chutiya?"

"God knows no religion. God belongs to mankind. I realized this while playing at the Balaji temple."

"I wish I could hold a concert....It is unfair that the Shehnai is not played at concerts. Why should not the Shehnai be played at the concerts?... Then let me do it now. Let me break tradition....May Lord Balaji help me."

"Tradition takes time to change. But it changes, all right. All that I have to do is to keep trying."

"Sukriya. An image can never be the real thing. Varanasi is where the Ganga flows, where I can play the Shehnai for Lord Balaji. I shall be at home, nowhere else but in India."

"Khan saheb’s music has found its way, penetrating barriers of religion, caste and class, to the hearts of millions of our people, uniting them in a shared ecstasy....He has never accepted that there is any contradiction between music and his religious faith, rather he sees perfect unity , a connection between the two...."

"K.R .Narayan, former President of India quoted in"

"Along with the steady diet sitar, sarod, and tabla, several new instruments and players came to my attention. The first of these was Ustad Bismillah Khan, master of the sonorous double-reed instrument known as shehnai. This beautiful wind instrument, with finger holes and a bell-shaped opening at the bottom, sounded to me like a hybrid of soprano saxophone and oboe, and Bismillah Khan’s tone very much influenced what Coltrane and Terry Riley would do with the soprano sax. Primarily used at weddings, the shehnai had been rejected as a classical instrument until Bismillah Khan elevated it to a higher status among listeners. His unique fingertips and sublime breath control produced the necessary range of sounds for raga making shehnai one of the more popular instruments in North India."

"These are the people who made the instrument become identified with them. If you said shehnai, you said Bismillah Khan. You did not say anybody else, it became synonymous."

"Ustad Bismillah Khan’s specialization lies in his ability to produce intricate sound patterns on the Shehnai, which was hitherto, considered impossible on this instrument."

"I just acted in the role but Ustad Bismillah Khan is the real soul of the film. He gave life to the character I played in the film."

"He was the undisputed jewel in the crown of Indian music; one who will not be born in the next few centuries. He gave a new meaning to shehnai."

"He did not even leave his favourite Banaras where the notes of his shehnai wafted across the Kashi Vishwanath and Sankat Mochan temples and intermingled with the placid waters of the Ganga,""

"Half-a-century ago, I came to Odisha to embark on my musical journey. This land has nourished my soul and nurtured my spirit. Through this Gurukul I wish to give back a small part of what I received from here."

"The flute is the symbol of spiritual call, the call of divine love."

"In my past there is Krishna. In my dreams I dream of recreating a huge college of flutists, a veritable Vrindaban in which students will arrive to learn and study with satchels full of flutes, live in mud huts, eat at a common langar. A modern Vrindaban from which a thousand flutes will ring out each day. For what else is there? When my breath is gone and I can not play anymore what do I leave behind? Some dedicated students! When you leave nothing behind, you cry at the point of death, but I still dream, I dare to dream that through my students my flute will be left behind as the memory of Krishna."

"Music is my love. And because it is my love, music has become my religion."

"When I play music, that is my best yoga, the best meditation, the best prayer."

"Whoever gets involved in this field becomes spiritual because the music itself is purely spiritual. The music is a prayer, a rare kind of prayer. Music is created by the Supreme entity (‘Brahma’) so that we can get an understanding or a view (‘Darshan’) of that entity."

"So, my instrument there is simply bamboo. The sound is straight from nature and it connects me to nature."

"A drop of water when you are thirsty gives such relief. The same drop in a fountain inspires you with its beauty. The same water in a dirty drain is repelling. And the same drop in the river makes you want to swim there and take a bath. And when the same water goes in the sea it thrills you with its power."

"First of all I choose a raga that gives me musical satisfaction. When I choose that raga then I welcome and invite the raga. To do that I have to meditate on the raga to understand its structure. When I get the structure then I can enjoy playing it. When I play a few beautiful notes, the spirit of the raga feels happy and comes and blesses me. Then the real music comes."

"Music helps you understand the deeper musings of the mind. Listening to music can help a person to a better understanding of his inner drives. This, in turn, gives him the confidence to follow the path in life dictated by his heart."

"I learnt kushti (wrestling) and music simultaneously,"

"Listening to that performance changed my life. It changed the course of my musical career. I could listen to my heart's voice clearly because the music had helped me understand my mind's deepest desires. Today, I am happy and feel blessed that I followed the path dictated by my heart."

"Music assists you in your quest of the spark hidden within, the moment you discover your real self through music, the reason why you have been born becomes clear. This realisation ultimately helps you mould your path to achieve your dreams."

"I could develop finer and newer blowing techniques because of the power my lungs acquired through the physical exercises my father personally taught me when I was training to become a wrestler,""

"It’s very difficult to make them understand the importance of a Guruji. In India, it’s kind of more than gods and goddesses. We revere our Gurujis more than our parents, more than our family members, more than gods and goddesses. But they’ll never understand. Never understand who a Guru is. There are so many differences. But when I am teaching at Rotterdam in Netherlands (He heads the World Music Department at the Rotterdam Music Conservatory), I tell each and every student-“keep your shoe out, you have to sit down. If you want to learn Indian music, you have to treat me- not like your teacher, not like your Guru, you treat me as a friend and we share our willing."

"Why to bring revolution? They are also human beings. Why don’t we treat ourselves as human beings? I speak Hindi and you speak your native language, but we are all human beings. Why do you treat them as foreigners? They also want to adapt to our tradition- some are visiting temples, they become vegetarians, some have given up spoons and eat using their hands, they try to become Sadhus. Why do you want to treat them as foreigners, they are human beings! If we get influenced by their tradition, it’s okay. If they get influenced by our tradition, it’s okay. Younger generation who try to emulate them will eventually come back to their native tradition!"

"Music has no differences. We played alongside each other; it was not in fusion but in unison. I have enjoyed playing with all the artists. I have collaborated with musicians from the west and fellow Indians, including Ravi Shankar, Allah Rakha (father of Zakir Hussain), George Harrison, Jean Pierre Ramphal, Jethro Tull, John McLaughlin, Jan Gabarek, Yehudi Menuhin and others. I composed for Bollywood. It made me affluent. It was Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma who asked me one day if playing in Bollywood films was all I was going to do in my life. I was not growing as an artist. I needed more. What did I have to show in terms of personal creativity, or growth? He was right."

"My father was a wrestler and though everyone liked music in the family, it was a taboo to even think of a musical career. I used to wrestle to keep him happy. When I was about nine years old, I started learning vocal music from Pandit Rajaram, secretly! At the age of fifteen, I heard the flute for the first time on Allahabad radio. It was as if I was being transported to heaven. The flautist was Pt. Bholanath and that was the major turning point in my life. Soon after, while I was still in my teens I got an offer to work as a staff artist on Cuttack radio in Odisha/ and I accepted. It was then that my father found out that I was a musician. It was a major shock for him."

"Who can you blame, parents or their friends or the children? In India every parent wants their child to earn more money and fame than any of their peers, no one wants their child to be set on a cultural journey and do tremendous things like other artists or musicians or sportsman have done. They think the entertainment sector won’t earn them any job or money. I blame the parents. They should inspire their children to pursue their interest along with the regular studies. I feel really sorry about this."

"Motivate the younger generation to listen to music especially, when they are tired, when they are upset about anything. Music is the best remedy; it remediates you mentally, physically and emotionally."

"Eventually you cannot stop the sun from rising, the water from flowing, the moon from spreading its light and you cannot compromise the seven notes with anything else. Live your life, live the music."

"I almost never go to temples. I don't find the time. I'm not religious in that sense. My religion is my music. Lord Krishna is my God. Whenever I want to pray, whenever I want to meditate and concentrate, I take my flute. I can feel God. The feeling is difficult to explain, but I feel lost when I'm in it."

"When I play, it is not for the audience. I play for that superior Power in between the audience and me. There are different kinds of people in the audience, and it is difficult for me to satisfy everyone. I perform for "that Power." If He is satisfied and happy, I feel blessed."

"Flute is an instrument which gives you more power as you play. It's like the breathing exercises in yoga. I'm able to increase my lung power by playing more. But because of travelling I don't get time to practice"

"Hariji (Hariprasad) and Shivji (Shiv Kumar) are the icons and ambassadors of Indian classical music. We have spent wonderful moments together during the making of the film Silsila"

"We are not mere friends, but more than two brothers. We met more than 50 years ago and we share a very beautiful bond between us. We worked together for films and immensely popular discs like Call of the Valley."

"When flutist Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia plays raagas on his bansuri the notes are not just heard but also felt!"

"The flutist's fan following cuts across all barriers and borders, Myriam."

"I was 16 when I heard him for the first time, and today in India, after 20 long years, I heard him play again. He is still so wonderful!. France is quite bansuri proficient. It's such an expressive instrument that all emotions like mysticism, romanticism, humour, etc can be brought out through this simple bansuri."

"Indigenous musicians in our backyard , who are also world-famous and as successful –people like hariprasad Chaurasia or Bhimsen Joshi. Why? Because they remain as desi as desi ghee. They dress Indian, talk Indian, walk Indian, eat Indian (paan, horror of horrors!), think Indian, feel Indian."

"He was the youngest composer and performer to be hired by |AIR Cuttack...he has developed the art of flute playing through his skilled blowing technique and adaptation of alap and ‘jat’ to the flute. Regularly experimenting with new styles of music, Hariprasad has played with western musicians such as John Mc Laughlin and Jan Garberik and has composed music for films like Silsila where he partnered with the master Santoor player Shivkumar Sharma. A true master in the art of Flute playing, his contribution to Indian classical music can not be undermined."

"People don't want to listen to an imitation. If they want to listen to my style, they will go and buy my records."

"The much loved classical diva of 20th century India Akhtaribai Faizabadi, or Begum Akhtar was the last of the great female singers from the courtesan (tawaif) community."

"As a tawaif, she was trained to charm the system and subvert narrow patriarchal practices by means of highly sophisticated seduction. At another level, she was a hapless victim, constantly tormented by the twists and turns of her own destiny. She braved on regardless, driven by a deep inner quest to pursue love in its purest form, as an end in itself; be it in music or in life."

"...singing sensation in the Indian subcontinent, feted by the cognoscenti and the commoner alike."

"Begum Akhtar's life perhaps mirrors an image where we too may briefly perceive ourselves and question the veracity of our own lives."

"Akhtar was gripped by constant melancholia. “Ya Allah, ab kya hoga?” was her constant refrain through her life that made her pour her heart and soul into couplets like “Mere Humnafas, Mere Humnawa, Mujhe Dost Ban ke Daga Na De, Mujhe Zindagi ki Dua Na De”."

"Today it's a challenge for me to sing with her portrait looking at me. Begum Akhtar's voice was a blessing and would touch the hearts of all."

"We live in an age where people are constantly trying to find remedies for pain, instead of learning how to sublimate it into divine music, the way Begum Akhtar did. For, the mercurial diva from Lucknow sang the poetry of Ghalib and many others in a manner that would make even pain seem desirable."

"A striking example [Poetry and Music] is Begum Akhtar who used sounds borrowed from language with such amazing skill. In her utterance the flowing lines of the vowel became graceful arches, and the hard consonants, supporting pillars. The edifice is then animated by vast range of hard, soft, nasal, throaty, sibilant and breathy sounds which became an integral part of her musical calligraphy. She is commonly thought of a ghazal singer,..."

"Begum Akhtar is a classic example of how personal tragedy is often that differentiating edge between a great performer and a truly exceptional one."

"...her taseer (soulful sound) was the result of years of loneliness, pain, suppression and silence."

"Akhtar was a master of what Brecht called the alienation effect; she had the ability to sing the saddest song with a bright smile."

"the early trauma of Begum Akhtar’s life resulted in the singer being consumed by melancholy. She always felt a deep vacuum in her life and lived in constant fear of “Ya Allah, ab kya hoga?” (Oh god, what next?)."

"Her forte was not necessarily the audibility of her music, for she had a defective area where her voice cracked at a high-pitch, with a limited one-octave range, but she turned it into her virtue for she knew how to mould her voice."

"She had lovers and, if the secret must be out, she drank. What else accounts for the naughtiness of her eyes? Like so many tawaifs (geishas, courtesans) there were ups and downs in her childhood, the father leaving the mother and so on, but she was blessed with the divine gift and her art transcended the various accidents of her life. In the end all else was forgotten. Only the legend and the accomplishment survive."

"I stumbled across a concert performance of the Begum singing Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Aaye kuch abr kuch sharab aaye, uss ke baad aaye jo azaab aaye” and I have been in a trance ever since."

"But Begum Akhtar who had trained long and hard under various Ustads is I think, and forgive the opinion of a rank amateur, in point of classical technique the more consummate artist."

"Gradually he [King Frederik] showed me everybody was going to help me in this...it was not a terrifying thing, but a great challenge."

"I was supported from every side by my family and by the ministers, but so much also by the people."

"That cold January day - and so many people... I'd never imagined it would happen nowadays."

"We were so busy that we didn't have time to think about how terrible it was or - in fact it felt strangely natural."

"God's help, the love of the people, the strength of Denmark."

"You are handed your job as the old king or queen dies... It is not a life sentence, but a life of service."

"Being Queen is a profession, a job, a position, an office that one cannot put aside when you come home from work. It is there all the time - and it is there all your life."

"I would like to stress that the obligation [of being Queen] has always been driven by joy. The joy is rooted in the warmth that has met me and my family everywhere through every year, in celebration and joy as in sorrow, in the so-called "big days", as well as in everyday life."

"I have always felt that it is a task that you are given, and that you have it as long as you live. That is my fundamental view. It is an integral part of the job that you have it for life."

"For me, it [being Queen] is a responsibility that does not include abdication. It is a task one has been given and taken upon oneself, and one does not relinquish it because it would perhaps be convenient personally to be rid of some of it."

"I will remain on the throne until I fall off!"

"In February this year I underwent extensive back surgery. Everything went well, thanks to the competent health personnel, who took care of me. Inevitably, the operation gave cause to thoughts about the future – whether now would be an appropriate time to pass on the responsibility to the next generation."

"I have decided that now is the right time. On 14 January 2024 – 52 years after I succeeded my beloved father – I will step down as Queen of Denmark. I will hand over the throne to my son Crown Prince Frederik."

"I do not think one should chase the fashions of the day, concerning neither sweaters nor opinions."

"One should never be so formal that one loses life, but one should never be so informal that one becomes without form of any kind."

"The fact that I am a woman has never really played into what I have done or not done. I have just been lucky that things have played out so that I could do things."

"But are we seeing indications these years that we have become more selfish, that we have become inclined to first and foremost make demands, and make sure that we all get what we ourselves think we are entitled to? Are we becoming distrustful of each other, and beginning to ascribe less than pure motives to each other? If that is the case, we are not only in an economic crisis. Then it is our attitudes that are slipping. It is a crisis that is insidious because it creeps upon us and poisons our relationships with each other. It means that we are jeopardising something that may be irretrievable."

"In the course of the last few generations, society has developed in such a way that we can live more and more safely, both financially and socially. We have got used to being able to pick and choose quite freely in big and small matters. Our circumstances are so good now that we have almost forgotten that our decisions also have consequences and that we cannot opt into or out of all life’s conditions."

"In spite of the many initiatives our society offers to help and support, recovery can be such a monumental task that some give up. They withdraw into themselves. Not least during Christmas and New Year is it hard to feel left out. Tonight my thoughts are with them."

"We do not have that much to moan about when one thinks of what people did not moan about before."

"Painting is not what my life is about, but it is very important to me, and I am very lucky to be able to give some time to it. The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts."

"I think, for me, nature has always been my main point of reference. I think as a child I was fascinated by landscapes and nature wherever I went. I was able to travel all over Denmark, which is not that large, everywhere in this country where I've been I always loved the landscape."

"For me it is always the colour, first and foremost."

"I think that people imagine protocol and etiquette as some kind of great dragon that hovers behind the pageantries of the palace to pounce on you and eat you up if you aren't behaving as you should. But in fact etiquette is saying how to do when you meet people, saying good night to your parents before going to bed, opening a door to a woman, getting up if an older person wants to sit down on the bus and it's all full, that is etiquette, or protocol, if you wish. At the everyday level, all the time, all of us. It's a way of knowing what you've got to do so that you have your mind free to do other things and think of other things."

"One would not die from my cooking, but I am not sure one would survive my driving."

"One may well use one's head even though one is in love. Someone has said that one cannot prevent lightening from striking – but one may prevent the whole town from burning down."

"When people say that I may not speak, they forget that I may well think. I may think what I want, like everyone else. I shall just refrain from saying everything I think. That might be something many people should do once in a while."

"We can be very relaxed in our relationship with the Danish people...I feel extraordinarily privileged."

"There is nothing so clever as people you agree with."

"I hope I will be able to paint as long as I live."

"One shouldn't write one's own epitaph. I hope people will remember me as one who did her best - and who wasn't an anachronism."

"With dignity, with proximity and wisely have you been an anchor for the Danes."

"You are not just 'Denmark's Queen'. You are the Danes' Queen."

"Dear mother – it is always parents who say they are proud of their children. I know your father, my grandfather, King Frederik IX, would have repeated: "I'm proud of you, my girl". But I stand here today as your eldest son, proud of his mother, and all she has achieved so far. Dear mother, you appear as the mother both of your sons remember from their youth: a beautiful queen, a stalwart girl."

"Art is a weapon and the weapons can change the world. Good art is irreverent, excessive, controversial, incorrect, irritating, ironic, bad behaving, playful and beautiful or ugly."

"I always disagree. I am always wrong. I'm a perpetual dissident. I like things I don’t understand."

"I paint what you love to hate and what you hate to love."

"I'm trying to change the world or at least to make the horrors of the global capitalism visible. I don't care much about art. I used to be a total artist but now I'm more a human being."

"Crap is the essence of innovation and technological advancement. ...It’s our human way of becoming … well … generators of more crap that helps us become more modern, productive and communicative human beings."

"Monday could not have arrived on a worse day. It could have been polite and waited until Tuesday or even Wednesday."

"I need to wake out of my stupor and begin work. ...my body stands frozen in a snow packed tundra waiting for rescue. It may take a few days before that happens, since my mind is on vacation in Alberta right now."

"My wife is talking to me this morning without realizing that her words go into my ears and drop directly to my toes. I hear their thud as they land and maybe a small wisp of air as they pass my brain. ...I need her to understand that the alligator in my head is eating the meaning of her words as my toes become crammed with their debris. She will still yell at me, but I have a good excuse now that I have an alligator residing in my head."

"What they [the Cactus Bristle gang] discovered is that people were not influenced by principles, such as the difference between democracy and communism, Judaism versus Islam, or even rich versus poor. They found people did not generally comprehend or like abstract principles. All people wanted was a place they called their own, a good job, and the ability to make life decisions with ample access to television."

"Human nature is very myopic about its existence. It very much wants to think their current reality is the absolute reality."

"History is a perfect arm-chair coach, but it lacks human sentiment. It’s like imagining living through the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It can’t be done. Essentially history is an emotional iceberg when it comes to human tragedy. We look upon the events of history as folklore, stories of human rights and wrongs, of character and cracks. History is always a good story, but its tragedies or success never hit our current-event nerve."

"Jason never knew a day without war. They raged since before he was born, and had become a silent backdrop to his everyday life. As long as it stayed in the big cities, he was satisfied to remain deaf, dumb and blind to the destruction."

"Right now, at this very moment, we are at that point in time where the dream dies and reality takes its place. We are the only ones that can appreciate that moment, because we are the only ones who know it. This is a future moment happening right now. Don’t you get it Jason, then is now. In a few minutes, the present reality we are experiencing will be gone; the dream will have ended because it became reality. All of these stratums of reality, the multiplicity of cascading sheets of our world are about to morph, and shift, and sort, all in one small single point in time."

"Magic gave a final wink and wave as it vanished into the cascading darkness of the dark lonely back road."

"A noted psychologist, who witnessed one of Mary Wellington’s desperate episodes, wrote about her in one of his articles. “Mary X’s behavior is symbolic of a gross narcissism that doesn’t allow anyone in their world except themselves. If there were a cure for this parasitic ailment, it would lead to world peace. Our modern technological society has inadvertently created the Mary X’s of the world, and our civilization suffers as a result. God help us all.”"

"He was soon asleep as the familiar cadence of Bach played in the background. It was no surprise that no one noticed."

"A couple walked past us holding hands. “You guys look so cute playing football in the park.” Little did they know that they just witnessed the biggest Super Bowl loss in the history of National League Football."

"The “have-nots” see agonizing death as an equalizing force. Their pompous attitude is unfair and their only advantage over us. Recently, I’ve come to resent them, to resent karma. ...I understood when Zombie died. I understood when Monica died. What I can’t understand is why I have to die at such a young age. It just doesn’t make sense. The only question I have is … WHY ME?"

"I trembled at the thought of commenting on The Economist. However, I knew I had to take the leap or I would forever see myself as a sissy failure, a scaredy-cat unable to put his stuff out into the world for a shake and bake session with the big boys."

"It’s COMMUNICATION MOBILITY. People love walking around engaged. They do NOT, I repeat do NOT love the phone. ...COMMUNICATION MOBILITY could take place with a cardboard box and people would love the cardboard."

"The pivotal element is TIME POVERTY."

"Reducing the consumption flow by rich people taking all the money is fun (if you’re rich) … at least for a while. ...In ten years, a new consumer class must emerge to continue to the devouring trend of consumption. IF NOT, the top falls from its own weight. The top dogs of global economic market cannot munch their way through product consumption to keep the show going. The result … CRASH!"

"I don’t like jumping in the ocean and pretending to be a fish. I don’t surf and I don’t enjoy swimming. ...I don’t enjoy fishing either. I must come from a line of beasts that lived on the beach but not in the ocean."

"The sequel would catapult me into the New York Times #1 book for 18 months straight. I would not allow my stardom to affect my Zen-Monk demeanor. I would retire into my mansion, become a Zen-Monk master and own three Jeeps."

"The ocean is an intoxicant or more like WD40. It greases the rusty parts of the mind and body and gets them moving like a precision machine."

"I learned how to work on automatic pilot over the years. It takes a lot of practice to keep a wife calm. I’ve actually become a wife-whisperer during my 32 years of marriage."

"I like to commemorate my trips with a localized t-shirt. I re-live my trips throughout the year, saying to myself that I am not trapped in a dungeon of incessant work because I go on vacations and have t-shirts to prove it."

"Luck is for the poor. For the rich, money flows to its natural source. ...You know, it’s true what they say. Life is a beach!"

"Today is my last full day at the ocean. ...Perfection is not only for the rich, the supremely talented, the powerful. It is also available to me."

"My wife says that I should be working for retirement instead of pursuing my sizzled dream of writing. I told her she was right. I should be working instead of goofing off. But, I’m a man. What does she expect?"

"All my inner beings become streams of brightly lucent colors. I touch each strand and each thread makes a unique tone."

"Aesthetics is merely an undiscovered force, expressed by a yet un-devised mathematical equation."

"Meditation takes chaos and begins magically morphing it into nothing."

"A battle line occurs at these critical points in time. The heaven born leader must fight the onslaught with vigor and courage. Yet, no person alone can avenge a malevolent enemy. A grain of sand cannot consider itself a beachfront nor can a single drop of rain claim to be a raging river. However, when all the forces combine in harmony, then rocks crumble into dust, the earth shakes, and mountains move."

"Summerset’s fine culture was the topping on the cake for his delicately assembled self-esteem. Culture was one of the top ranking rest and relaxation pastimes for the citizens of Summerset. The Summerset Art Gallery, the... Theater Group, ...Museum of Fine Art, and its annual Summerset Independent Film Festival were the heartbeat of the township. It was a joy to live in Summerset’s cultural coated lining of contemporary living. It made one feel a cut above the rest of the mundane world."

"A homeostat constantly seeks to establish a balance which is perpetually disrupted, and performs a statistical exploration of all the possible combinations of inputs."

"Aesthetic hygiene is necessary for collective societies, for any social group residing together on a large scale. How? By programming environments that obey rigorous aesthetic criteria. Each time the inhabitant walks around in the city, he must bathe in a climate that creates in him a specific feeling of well-being, invoked by the massive presence of aesthetic products in the environment,"

"As was the case with other artists, Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics," published in 1948, was to have great significance for the work of Nicolas Schöffer. On reading it he made his first acquaintance with the science in the making, and he was later to incorporate cybernetic concepts in several of his most interesting works. Schoffer's application of cybernetics — which Wiener defined as "control and communication in the animal and the machine"-postulated that the behaviour of a mobile sculpture would be influenced by the behaviour of the spectator and by the environment in accordance with a fixed pattern and this would in turn influence the spectator."

"Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) formulated his idea of a kinetic art that was not only active and reactive, like the work of his contemporaries, but also autonomous and proactive, in Paris in the 1950s. He developed sculptural concepts he called Spatiodynamism (1948)."

"Hungarian-born artist Nicolas Schöffer created his first cybernetic sculptures CYSP 0 and CYSP I (the titles of which combined the first two letters of “cybernetic” and “spatio-dynamique”) in 1956."

"In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as , Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer’s role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham’s 1968 Artforum essay “Systems Aesthetics” and his 1970 “Software” exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century."

"All my work is informed by personal experience. It is the seed to which I apply a transcendent dialogue. The idea for my first bubble machine was rooted in a complex combination of many memories. During the Second World War I was in my sister’s arms when I saw a young Filipino guerrilla shot by a Japanese soldier. The young guerrilla ran into our garden. The sight of him lying there dying, red blood bubbles foaming from his mouth, made a strong impression on me. Flying over the Grand Canyon on my first trip to America, visiting a soap factory at the bottom of Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseilles, a visit to a brewery in Edinburgh in Scotland: these left deep impressions as well. My mother cooking “guinataan”, a Philippine dessert made of coconut milk and tropical fruit, and the movement of clouds over Manila Bay near where I was born, inspired me to create a work of art that would express and embody the motion of clouds."

"In the 1960s the works of and Tinguely were experiments with different forces, both magnetic and kinetic. My work differed from theirs, for although my kinetic art works used machines, the works themselves moved in random organic ways and avoided the monotonous repetitive movements of most machines. My land art projects and all the rest of my cosmic propulsions were born out of the organic and my relation with the dynamics of nature. When I first exhibited with Liliane Lijn at the Indica Gallery in London in 1967 I called my artworks bio-kinetic sculptures. Some of my artworks in that show are featured in the film I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname by the English director Michael Winner."

"Every morning I wake up with the news of bloodshed. I feel my body, desperate to know whether I’m still alive."

"Thank God, my name isn't in the list of those who died or were killed yesterday!"

"An uneasy rhythm of life is more life like than an easy death."

"I chose none to ask why the wind was blowing there chasing the fogs"

"I asked none why life ends in ways uncertain."

"The dream too thinks twice, gets filtered to go soft to be seated on children's eyes."

"Even if they (Children) try to pluck it, the flower submits itself onto their hands. If it happens to prick their heels, the thorn scorns itself all its life."

"I wonder– didn’t the Creator really do injustice? With a power to defeat everyone without any battle, children are busy at play with the most beautiful moments of their life. Once they grow conscious of it, those moments will have gone away never to return to them."

"Once positioned on their(children's) lips, even the scariest of words come out as a melodious lisp."

"Even If they (children) fall during their play, the nature, having come under the spell of their creative sports, doesn’t know when they again start to play so full of jest. Believing that they fall unknowingly the ground, mostly, does not even hurt them."

"If they (children) smash, the flower vase assumes a smile while turning into pieces. For a chance to be spilled by their hands, anything they hold gets spilled itself full of happiness. For a chance to play with them, water forgets about its own colourlessness."

"Let me not so much be lost in involvements as would make me incapable of recognizing the fragrance of the flower beaming in my own yard."

"May I not so much be lost as would have No time to look at myself Ever."

"May I not so much, so much be lost, just To see the hue, grace, glory gone Off the face of my beloved As I’d wake and be conscious."

"Will you please go journeying for your own sake, till I come living a moment of life?"

"Through years of my prime I walked with a heart crazy about love."

"I wanted my heart to bloom and shelter a shadow of love"

"I wanted to paint a picture, in indelible print, across the canvass of my heart."

"I am tipsy after my own feelings themselves have become wine. I forget myself, world and all."

"If I'd ever grown prosperous like Shah Jahan was, I'd not have waited for my beloved's death before I erected a Taj Mahal."

"I want the fever to grab me forever and want you to be my fever"

"Tonight, may I get so drunk in love that I do not see any dreams!"

"Commands- you're sure to hear from above if you're placed down below."

"I like desires like children and their plays that tease me now and then into knowing life."

"I salute my desires with a bow., were it not for them to come and play mind would be empty just like me."

"I believed all along, one day everyone would go mad just to see me sane."

"Even after all that, each and every being here believe, that the heat will be defeated and coolness will prevail. The experience knows that the rule of an autocrat cannot last long."

"Haunted trees covered behind the curtains of their own leaves stare at the dark from the fringe of streets."

"Lampposts look in the glow of their defeated light robbed by the fog but cannot tell if the streets lying by stretching limbs in courtyards are sleeping face downwards or supine."

"Creation does not cease just because there is darkness!"

"I would regard meanings given by others so far as refreshing boon, I would still be enamored of rose or any heartless flower's smell if tender tides of your affection had not suffused the pollen of my heart with loving aroma."

"I shall not go out at all given that my love is here shall always stay attached to these hearts. I shall never bid farewell to this place! But I have to send this body anyhow from here."

"What heart touched is what is touched what heart experienced is what is experienced where heart lived is what is lived."

"I could not say which one was more authentic, their fate or the slender woody sticks that supported their shacks."

"I felt I was getting enraged and losing my speech like them losing their dreams."

"I was feeling like mad by the melody of birds singing out of tune in the settlements where travels lose their own destinations."

"Is freedom dearer than life? or does it become easier to live when life becomes difficult?"

"Life was running, running after a mirage-like desires."

"I asked my life why it carried along my dreams but chose to escape me."

"Still enveloped in a blanket of dreams my life continued to lie still, pretending as if it was in a deep slumber."

"The road kept coming, and continued going somewhere alone."

"This evening, too the Sun had to tell the same story before he went away, leaving the forlorn moon hankering after his light."

"Let us be honest we have praised Angulimala will make no difference if you convey my salute to Amrapali."

"This moment I am keener on the stories of valour washed away by this year's monsoon floods than the abstract shapes glued to myths, history and stories."

"When this flood blocks the road I am worried more by my soil getting washed, than by getting late to reach my destination."

"Should I complete this poem or should I put my room’s light out?"

"In how many minds should I go crazy? whom should I ask?"

"Which eyes should I look for to find the ultimate unreasoned answer?"

"Without asking anybody’s advice I turned myself insane."

"You who are sitting before me have the power to change my consciousness into painting, poem, melody or anything else!"

"I know you'll speak no truth at this time. I've to be guided solely by your silence, your eyes and the inaudible appeals of your heart."

"The walls are releasing heat , as if they are angry with each other. The room has been insaned by the heat. The bed is inflamed as if it were an oven. The bed sheet is soaked with sweat, and about to run away getting stuck to the man."

"The experience knows that the rule of an autocrat cannot last long."

"From the sky one cannot touch the heart of the stone petrified with a desire to live after living a life of softness for long, one cannot get to touch the tenderness of a flower smiling despite being battered in turn by heat and frost."

"The lovers feel that they are content looking at each other from a distance. The repulsiveness caused by heat between them, is more powerful than all cravings for love and lust."

"Having been ripped open and drained by the crowd when I enter my home, many homes seem to be waiting for me to give a shape to this life which is about to perish."

"I'm searching a heart inside me-- a heart that's ebullient by swallowing the entire pain of the creation, a heart jubilant by accepting the entire tears of the world, a heart aglow by merging the entire dark within itself a heart that's smooth, effervescent and clean."

"This market speaking life when heard from each person is now making staggering confused noise of all people speaking together."

"Man and woman cease to be humans once they get lost into crowds."

"Are people like market who live as humans when they’re alone but live as great complexity when they’re in groups?"

"Pristine river of lives is swallowed by the crowd- Human getting lost into humans."

"All trees and birds sky and stars bosoms and bangles were seeing everything."

"I had also read on the face of surroundings some broken some disconnected some cracked expectations."

"I’ve touched some sentences and have kissed some words."

"Eyes that obstruct the road can be removed but what happens when hearts block the passage?"

"Do not think I’ve reached where I am now by slipping like a landslide or evaporating like a cloud."

"I’ve climbed up here holding the hilt of time’s sword after driving it into my tender heart."

"Whether anybody comes to convince me or not a part of my life does always ache arresting my chest."

"May I splinter away from myself break into whole units and live in each with perfection!"

"This ME made whole by combining countless fragments could not live in any one part with complete ease."

"May I discard the outer cover of time from the layers of poetry by immersing the poet in its entirety within me"

"May life remain enamored of its own charm"

"May the river of love always flow from its own lap."

"May my pain remain drunk singing its own love songs"

"(May) the dead body of agony remain asleep resting its head on a pillow of flowers."

"May I free myself from the labyrinth of knowledge"

"May I pack all inventions in burlaps and hide them in corners of Einsteins’ brains."

"May I free myself from the ever-pressing chest and enter the garden of imagination by leisurely hiding brain on hill summits."

"May I take off clothes covering shame at the border leaving them hanging on dry trees of arrogance and run by wearing the rays of the sun."

"May I create plain fields by collecting clouds and bedeck them with arching rainbows."

"Playing ball of wind reaching the other end of The Road Not Taken may I call in Robert Frost by holding hands and request Ginsberg to recite Howl facing the world."

"May I exchange T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland with the future of this earth like a lunatic’s dreams and make one season of poetry farming by tilling with the pen of desire."

"Fell in love with these hearts and this soil these houses, these walls and streets."

"Every moment age is creeping up stealthily, but life, life is melting down like a candle that is flickering around."

"Life is withering away like a candle that is melting down."

"Life incinerates incessantly trying to smile and keeps broiling continuously pretending to be alive."

"Death is shaping up slowly and quietly but life, life is melting down like a candle that is flickering all night."

"Neither my acts have wiped the woes of any sufferer out, nor have I cured pains of wounded ones; with the faith pompous mercenary, O' Glorious! O 'Lord Almighty! how can I bow my head in your adulation?"

"Neither my deeds contain any essence nor, my gestures have sense of zeal, my days are creeping forth for nothingness; with this body deficient of heart and soul O' Glorious! O' Lord Almighty ! how can I come close to you?"

"Tonight, let us exchange every part of our bodies and every space of our souls with each other."

"The eyes hold tears for so long, let us fill it with love and passion."

"Let us convert this night we are breathing together, to a bright morning."

"Unaware about my surrounding, unconscious I live."

"It’s not my wish to walk intoxicated; to live for never is not my choice."

"A portion of life, every moment gets torn out of me hurting, and flees away."

"Wishing to grab the life with nothingness wanting to erase the sigh of tiredness forgetting myself completely from my being why do I seek embrace of yours do not ask me, I know not, I am in oblivion."

"Let my pains remain with me."

"Let my pains remain with me, I won't utter, I express it not."

"My heart itself is a wound, no medicine can cure it. It deepens further if stared at, and hurts more if touched."

"This ambiance of candlelight reminds of nights that traveled its way, in entangled embrace of yours and mine."

"I like you everywhere on you."

"May I get melted in closeness and get blazed in embrace."

"I wish me to cry for no reason in excess of love."

"I wish me to vanish somewhere around here."

"The feeling I groped assuming love was nothing but a fire."

"Keep some fires burning in your heart; I would extinguish it if I could, or get myself engulfed with it."

"I shall give you a song, and you fill melody in it."

"I want to be everywhere of you."

"How could it be wished that poetry of a mellow age be born when this time is taking showers in the drama of loathsome taste!”"

"It's not as easy as it is with chewing shame and foolishness to chew the wreckage of broken time."

"I'm bereft of poetry on this planet, from where the beauties of Creation are vanishing away furiously.”"

"What was wafting in the smoke of burning tires? Where had time caught in the traffic jam not reaching?”"

"I had read on the face of surroundings; some broken, some disconnected, some cracked expectations."

"I want to love the self that you say is you."

"May my pains remain with me, I won't utter, I express it not."

"I gather all of my sorrow, and bring you in my reminiscence, I think of you and forget all of my pain."

"When I closed my eyes withdrawing myself from darkness I saw light glowing everywhere."

"I spry my closed vision over the streets of this city and the shadows lurching within it."

"The road meanders, wandering in tandem with itself."

"Ascending and descending, uphill and downhill, the road inclines and slopes, sliding down yet climbing anew."

"The road never halts."

"Splitting love among differences between love and soul, love and the heart, love and the body love and life and slicing it further into multiple pieces how may I offer you my entire love?"

"I have offered many of my self to you to get a single you."

"I lived my youth in dreams of others."

"Someone asked me, 'Is there water in your pot?' I pointed to the leaves of a coconut tree."

"Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”"

"In influencing write-ups, words seem to move despite residing still on paper."

"In many a situation, the images that words hide while walking forth are the desired meaning of particular words rather than the word itself. Those words sing and dance by coming out of the paper."

"Language is texture of images and music. We speak in images and rhythm, by taking help of words."

"In literary translations, it is this very articulation of expressions that matters the most to bring home to the readers the full essence of the original text in question."

"Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation."

"On translating text into the new language as it is in source language, there is a chance of it being emerged as an absurd sentence in the target language making no sense at all. In the attempt to make the translation meaningful to the target language, there exists a risk of the original work getting meddled by the translator’s style.”"

"Literary translation is not merely an act of picking words from one language and keeping it by dipping in the vessel of another language. Those words need to be rinsed, washed, carved and decorated as much as possible."

"Poetry emerging from a poet enters into the reader only when it comes within the readers’ 'sphere of intellect."

"A reader cannot take poetry by expanding it beyond his/her consciousness, rather can take by shrinking it within."

"There exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation."

"Before getting translated, a poem already gets shrunk or expanded within the ‘sphere of intellect’ of the translator in the original language, and it again gets shrunk or expanded within the ‘sphere of intellect’ of the translator in the target language."

"In translation of poetry; there exists a possibility of components like imagination, art of wordplay, skill of constructing internal rhythm and expand of knowledge of the poet getting affected by the constraint and differentia of the translator."

"Poetry is a potent tool capable of guiding societies worldwide through its invisible aesthetic strength."

"Imagery plays a vital role in conveying a message, bringing it to life, and engaging readers' senses and emotions."

"Anything that touches my heart holds the potential to inspire me."

"Nature is the grandest warehouse discovered on this planet, hence anything that touches my heart holds the potential to inspire me, as it enables me to delve into my emotions and forge connections with others through shared experiences."

"The importance of forging meaningful relationships and exploring the intricacies of human connections has served as a catalyst for my creative expression."

"Through my writing, I aim to highlight the significance of fostering healthy and fulfilling relationships and inspire others to cherish the bonds they share with fellow human beings."

"Imagery immerses readers in the ambiance created by the pebbles of words, making it compelling and memorable."

"My ultimate aspiration in life is to contribute to a world where peace prevails, as peace is the ultimate achievement to realize in life."

"Writing is also like love, if one can't have the courage to be a renunciant, they cannot write well."

"At this juncture, the 'world' is no longer confined to just one or two places; it has spread worldwide."

"Nature is the grandest warehouse discovered on this planet."

"I firmly believe that everyone should be free to pursue their desires as long as it does not harm others or society."

"As human beings, we have an innate need to create and innovate from within ourselves to address our own concerns."

"I believe that the human being is the most complicated chapter of existence, with thousands of dimensions."

"As a writer, I believe that showing or letting readers feel is often more convincing than telling, and imagery allows me to accomplish just that."

"Peace is the ultimate achievement to realize in life."

"Poets are the most difficult creatures to work with."

"Human being is the most complicated chapter of existence."

"As humans, we seek ways to fill gaps in our lives through love, food, pleasure, challenges, and more."

"Nepal is my home, a land of many wonders, but the greatest of them all is its unparalleled diversity and rich heritage.”"

"I dread to think of a society devoid of love, compassion and humanity."

"Love is a feeling and its expression is an art."

"I found the Taj Mahal as the most appropriate example of artistically expressed love."

"As my childhood got opportunity to grow up amidst variety of geography and people practicing different cultures, I could experience the very essence of our diversity."

"Poetry is part of our culture in many ways."

"I am quite sure that poetry will live long with our generations to come."

"Love, compassion, humanity are values which are irreplaceable."

"The Taj Mahal is not just a monument, but a symbol of love."

"We cannot imagine a mind without body."

"A good poem cannot be written with one's mind on the earth. Though one has to write poems about the earth and existence, one cannot write poems while staying grounded. To write an outstanding poem, a flight to the heights of transcendence is needed. However, a person cannot always remain in that elevated state. When one descends, they touch the earth and write ordinary stuff."

"Trust isn't solely about keeping faith in others' promises; it's also about being dependable in the promises we've made to others."

"Merely holding the desire to walk together with someone is not enough if one does not possess the art and aptitude of walking together."

"A heart can hold a heart-full of anything."

"Silence is the best language to speak in when you have lots of things to say."

"I am stark sane, but my mind is erratically crazy."

"I am playful in words but sincere in action."

"No matter how happy you are; start assuming, suspecting and doubting; and make yourself the most unhappy person on the universe."

"Keep yourself busy until you feel sleepy."

"Silence is polite, but not always."

"Love is the cruelest event."

"Sometimes, silence works more intensely than a bayonet to slay a tender heart."

"Some people are so stiff-necked that they cannot think any other way than their own preconceived ideas."

"If you are working in a team, do not expect an outcome of your excellence."

"Together; we would create some ecstatic memories, but you are either busy or sleepy."

"I exist no more, every moment a new being lives inside me."

"They called it that, I mean ‘democracy’."

"Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions.. .I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation."

"As Arp and I are sitting in the large living room of my house on Central Park in November 1958, we try again and again to understand the significance of Dada for ourselves and for others. Many elements surfaced in me and in the 'Fantastic Prayers' [his poems Phantastische Gebete, Zurich 1916] at the same time; resistance against the 'civilization' we live in, fury about a purely factual world which leaves out personality and thus creative power, the means of irony and underlying religiousness. Ball turned religious during the times of dadaism, Arp is a religious person today, and I have always been one, without wanting to realize it, perhaps without knowing it."

"There is a difference between sitting quietly in Switzerland [Dada in Zurich] and bedding down on a vulcano, as we did in Berlin."

"[ Tinguely is a] Meta-Dadaist... [who had] fulfilled certain ideas of ours, notably the idea of motion."

"The dissection of words into sounds is contrary to the purpose of language and applies musical principles to an independent realm whose symbolism is aimed at a logical comprehension of one’s environment.. ..the value of language depends on comprehensibility rather than musicality"

"The cows sit on the telegraph poles and play chess The cockatoo under the skirts of the Spanish dancer Sings as sadly as a headquarters bugler and the cannon lament all day..."

"That is the lavender landscape Herr Mayer was talking about when he lost his eye Only the fire department can drive the nightmare from the drawing- room but all the hoses are broken..."

"Have you seen the fish that have been standing in front of the opera in cutaways for the last two days and nights..? Ah ah ye great devils – ah ah ye keepers of bees and commandments With a bow wow wow with a bow woe woe who does today not know what our Father Homer wrote..."

"I hold peace and war in my toga but I'l take a cherry flip Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow They beat time with a coffin lid If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers out of the trolley car it's a great age..."

"The professors of zoology gather in the meadows With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead Again thou hauntest castle and grounds The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds (And this is how the world is this is all that's ahead of us)"

"Huelsenbeck has arrived [from Berlin]. He pleads for an intensification of rhythm (Negro rhythm). He would prefer to drum literature into the ground."

"So, Huelsenbeck has put our feud in print -- HA HA So he sneers at my bourgeois home -- my child who cries, who has to be changed and fed So he laughs at my solid wife -- that she's no Anna Bloom.. ..The one who makes art -- he's the artist.. .So I spit back at you, Huelsenbeck But where you spit venom, I spit art I laugh at you -- HA HA -- I laugh at you"

"When the word 'Dada' came to me [in German: 'mir begegnete'], I was called upon twice by Dionysios [Areopagita]. D.A. – D.A. (H...k [= Huelsenbeck] wrote about this mystical birth [of the new word, Dada], as did I in earlier notes)"

"Feminist porn productions show that female lust and the sexual well-being of women can be very much the focus of porn - and that it can be female-positive, gender-aware and at the same time male-friendly."

"Porno ist nie nicht politisch. (Porn is never not political.)"

"Shame is closely connected to sexuality. The naked body itself is still as politically charged as nothing else."

"Freedom of speech is very important because it is a fundamental part of our rights. Everyone must be allowed to say what they mean."

"Everyone can draw, and a drawing doesn't have any mistakes."

"Religious people are looking everywhere for blasphemy, but we cartoonists are just trying to make people laugh."

"Never give up hope, try with confidence; you will be successful."

"Vasarely Go Home!"

"After being expelled from the Academy, Major worked one year unskilled labourer in the Orion Factory."

"János Major started to take photographs in cemeteries at the beginning of the sixties most probably around 1962-63."

"Simplicity is very complicated."

"New is a very old word."

"I don't work, I either play or pray."

"I believe that all art is playing seriously."

"The only prison is myself."

"It was in the desert, where there seems to be nothing, that's where I learned to see."

"An artwork is a container of a human experience. A poem in a closed book is contained energy, ready for whoever reads it, wanting to be charged. Art is able to energize a part of us that is usually ignored. In my experience, the artworks that touch us deeply and manage to connect with us are artworks that have a rich internal world and vital inner connectivity with themselves. The hard part is the ability to detect it because it’s not about the obvious elements in an artwork; most of the time, it is about what is beneath that which is evident. It’s the unseen, the invisible. I believe that the appearance of the artwork is a big obstacle. We call it visual art but it’s all about the invisible."

"In front of every blank canvas or paper, I face nothingness. What breaks it is the desire of doing. With each blank paper, there is a new unknown to explore, a nothingness to go through. By doing it more and more, a hidden part of me is unveiled. After some time, it isn’t about me anymore but about the whole universe. By exploring my nature, I explore the universe’s nature. We are one. Each painting is a cosmic one, even if it’s a failure. When I make a painting, the painting makes me too."

"Nevertheless, the answers remain innumerable and the sculptures seem different to the eyes of each beholder. Next to a drop of darkness that widens across the page of life may appear a meteorite radiated by cosmic waves, while the black disk of a pendulum keeps on reminding us of the inexorable flow of time. All this is seen through the fascinating kaleidoscope of Armen's art that projects images on images in an implacable vortex of stimuli. No single analysis is considered definitive because, as it happens for the hermetic poetries, in front of the sculptures of Armen an interpretation is tied intrinsically to the sensibility of the observer."

"Each work may be considered as a contemporary microcosm, unnamed, self-referential, but rich of past and present identity, still tied to previous work but announcing the forthcoming one, which enables the viewer to participate in the discovery of his inner energy, sharing in the identity."

"These sculptures are not altars but mirrors of the viewer's soul."

"Defying the ego, Armen Agop releases his works into the world detaching himself from them. For him, the man, it's all about the process, and for the stone, it's about endurance. Perhaps, his works can be regarded as contemporary conduits for the Ka, rare portals of communication between the incorporeal and the terrestrial realm. Created in time, they are meant to resist time, vibrating within their own frequencies as an undying ode to life."

"Psychiatry and comics have a lot in common, because they are related to the thinking of people I care about very much."

"Doctors cure diseases for humans, and cartoonists cure diseases for society. Humor can promote people's understanding of the complex conditions in contemporary society."

"People often confuse jokes with humor, but my humor is very serious. I not only make people laugh, but also make people reflect and analyze."

"I decided to do this because of a personal interest, and because I was totally convinced of what I had to do. The position of a professional here doesn’t greatly differ in economic status from that of any other productive activity, so it wasn’t something that would have a great effect on me. It is true that I won’t have the same degree of stability, but that’s the risk you take to do what you really want."

"the essential thing for a cartoonist is information. The more information you have “laid down” in your head, the more options you will have to create cartoons that are not trite or repetitive, and the better your ideas will be. This also presupposes a work ethic that requires you to rediscover yourself every day, and allows you to avoid “easy” solutions."

"The initial influences on my work are in the work that was developed in Cuba in the humor magazine Dedeté [DDT], which avoids “pamphletizing” [crude propagandizing] and looks for new forms of communication … for non-traditional esthetic solutions. That’s where my style starts out."

"Participation in international humor events has brought me many other influences. My work style includes a large dose of “esthetic vampirism,” in that I’ve absorbed a lot from a lot of different people. But I have a central axis, my major cartoon characters, who have been changing in their own right along with the changes in the type of humor that I happen to be doing."

"It’s impossible that in any society everyone will be in favor of the government. This happens here also. These folks are in the minority, as far as I can see, and, anyway, it has to be that way – if it were not so, this Revolution would not have lasted more than 40 years, 90 miles from the U.S."

"My cartoons are published in various media outlets, not only in Latin America but also in Europe, Asia and the U.S. In some cases, I’ve gotten paid for them, in others not. In most cases, what they pay me is truly miserable, but I persist, with the happiness of seeing my work reproduced and accepted by many people."

"The role of political art in Cuba is a big one. The newspaper where I have worked for years makes major use of editorial cartoons, and on not a few occasions the front page is a full-page cartoon."

"you will find Cuban heavy metal musicians, or rappers, along with those who play salsa – all outside influences are accepted without problems."

"This isn’t a perfect country; we have lots of difficulties and many things that need to be improved, and many things that need to change. But we also have many things that are worthy of admiration, things that just about no other country of the so-called third world has achieved, or will achieve for a long time."

"What does bother me as a Cuban and an intellectual worker is that from the United States they’re trying to tell us Cubans what to do. President Bush recently called for democracy in Cuba; but I can’t explain to myself what moral standing he has, to give democracy lessons to my country, he being a president who got to the White House after fraudulent elections."

"To top it off, he wants to bomb any country that he pleases, using a slogan that a country is “antidemocratic” – which simply means that anyone who is not for him is against him, and thus a potential target of attack. According to Bush, here you can see the “socialist hell.” Well, in that case, rather than prohibiting U. S. citizens from traveling to Cuba, they should do as the writer Eduardo Galeano suggested: organize tourist excursions so people could see these “horrors.”"

"Finally, she looks up and asks: “Do you have any pets?” She doesn’t know why this question. He shakes his head. He doesn’t like the idea of animals being domesticated. He says something about corrupting the animal spirit. She says: “And cockroaches?”"

"“One of my happiest memories is playing piano-and-violin duets with him,”. THE NEW YORK TIMES. (24/12/201"

"“Part of what I focus on is the pervasive presence of oppression, violence and hierarchies and the dominant roles they play in social life,"

"“I mean the truth is my husband is a brilliant director and a very commanding presence. Our relationship has been extremely passionate. We like to be together. But he does tend, when he walks into a room, to take up most of the space."

"An artist's creation is an extension of themselves, thus their artworks mirror their inner workings, desires and fears. When someone commits money to buy art, it is an indication, that they were moved by an aspect of the work."

"My art addresses my internal tension between my deep love for Nigeria, my country of birth, and my strong appreciation for Western culture, which has profoundly influenced both my life and my art."

"You don't exist if you aren't represented... i felt a need to claim my own social existence by making the representation happen."

"I was always going to be known as the bastard."

"I represent myself."

"Day by day, as I started learning about photography, I fell more in love with it. There was a huge need for women photographers in Afghanistan."

""How A Female Photographer Sees Her Afghanistan". NPR.org. Retrieved 12 April 2025."

"I try to show the bigger image, not just show we have problems," she says. "And we do have a lot of problems, but I do want to show normal daily life."

"Many Afghan photographers are not well-connected," she explains. "We hope it will create a better connection and show Afghanistan by Afghan photographers."

"She had spent her life living under the Taliban; she knew what that meant for Afghan women, and she understood that she could tell their stories in photographs."

"Women were banned from continuing their education during Taliban rule. But some, like Farzana, found ways to keep studying. She would carry books under her burqa and attended what she calls an "underground school" with about 300 other students in a residential area of Kabul."

"I'm hoping people get the sense of awe that I have when I'm in the water. I hope they feel transformed, and inspired to love the ocean,"

"I love that moment of immersion where someone jumps in and they bring that air into the water. It's a really visceral feeling of immersion; going into another place and another world,"

"Throughout my career, the water has featured as a muse and illustrates the different connections I have with the ocean and how it may have mirrored my own psychology at a particular time,"

"Photography is isolating, so I tend to try and find bodies of work that are actually an extension of how I'm living, so whether it's walking on the beach or in the ocean or swimming — it's a way of exploring what that means to me and why I'm attracted to it,"

"She was so strongly influenced by the teachings of this faith that she became a Baháʼí in 1922. She was the first woman who converted to this faith in Australia."

"She had developed the films under moonlight and ensured that each picture was good before leaving that location."

"Shoghi Effendi liked her photographic work, and included the photographs she had taken of monument gardens on Mount Carmel and others in the Baháʼí yearbook."

"I always believe – If I direct I’ll become a better actor, and if I act I’ll become a better diretor"

"Part of me would say that you do everything and anything because even in something that may not seem interesting at the time, there is a reason for it to come."

"I think the challenge has been to make a living basically because we are not hugely supported"

"I tend to be a very optimistic person"

"I seldom get depressed and if I do, it’s very shortlived and it’s usually about a play or in the process of a character"

"I think I felt a great sense of liberation when I turned 40. I was less hard on myself. We have this terrible stigma that we are lesser than"

"Never say no. I always said no at the beginning. I’d say, “No, I won’t do this, I’ll wait for that. No, I won’t do this yet"