Olafur Eliasson Quotes

In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.

I'm somebody who has to physically experience an environment in order to know it as well as I would like to know it. I recognize this is impressionistic, not scientific. People say, 'You sound like Walt Whitman.' Well, I'll take that comparison.

We take the sense of touch for granted. Think about it: Without it, you're missing one of the basic senses that enables you to interact with the world.

If only we know, boss, what the stones and rain and flowers say. Maybe they call-call us-and we don't hear them. When will people's ears open, boss? When shall we have our eyes open to see? When shall we open our arms to embrace everything-stones, rain, flowers, and people? What do you think about that, boss? And what do your books have to say about that?

By nature, I am a materialist... It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I'm interested in.

You can touch everything and be connected to nothing.

I, who cannot see, find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough shaggy bark of a pine.

If you're in touch with your body, you certainly have an enormous sexual advantage. The mind-body connection is the same in sex as it is in training.

I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

Dogs need to sniff the ground; it's how they keep abreast of current events. The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds of late-breaking dog news items, which, if they are especially urgent, are often continued in the next yard.

All it means is that, while our minds may have trouble communicating, our bodies don't have any problem at all." "I don't think it's that simple." "Sure it is." "The earth moved," she said softly. "That has to be more than bodies communicating.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

The totality of the psyche can never be grasped by the intellect alone.

In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.

All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for...There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre.

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct.

Let the flesh instruct the mind.

Of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?