Claes Oldenburg Quotes

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

One thing is certain. The old Piper Laurie is no more.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Die and born again, die and born again. It's the story of my life.

Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form.

He built a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for more than two weeks. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and... he was a beautiful butterfly!

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

From every ruin, life springs up again and everything that dies is born again.

All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.

Life depends on change, and renewal.

If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.

What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

Death, is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.

Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself.

The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

There was a moth in there, and it still had its wings crumpled up, and it was just starting to pump its wings up. Life continues in lots of places, and life is a magical thing.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

My sun sets to rise again.