Qaanosq > Qaanosq's Quotes

“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”
― John Cage

“I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it.”
― John Cage

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”
― John Cage

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
― John Cage

“In the dark, all cats are black.”
― John Cage

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.”
― John Cage

“Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths...”
― Rollo May

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult 'What is that?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951

“This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Don't think, but look! (PI 66)”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....

Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
― Wittgenstein Ludwig

“It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.

The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Think, for example, of the words which you perhaps utter in this space of time. They are no longer part of this language. And in different surroundings the institution of money doesn’t exist either.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations