Quote collection
108 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden."
"Loving means getting rid of names."
"The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end."
"Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others."
"The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church."
"What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without; born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches."
"Language lies outside of society because it is its foundation; but it also lies within society because that is the only place where it exists and the only place where it develops."
"Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life."