Barnett Newman Quotes

Everything has changed, but the process of telling a story has not changed. It's like cavemen sitting around the fire; somebody's going to tell the story. Somebody is drawing on the wall. You're communicating. You're trying to learn and teach at the same time. You're your own student and you're your own teacher, but the process is of the communicating.

I don't know how to be a friend. I don't know how to be anything.

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.

I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.

If you're wondering if you're dreaming, you're dreaming.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.

We don't say nothing more. What else is there to say? Everything and nothing. You can't say everything, so you don't say nothing.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.

Communication: the thing humans forgot when we invented words.

The most wonderful thing in the world is somebody who knows who they are and knows where they're going and knows what they were created to do

I've got about ten things to say to you right now. But at least nine of them would make me sound like a psycho.” In spite of the seriousness of the situation, I nearly smiled. “What’s the tenth thing?” I asked his shirtfront. He paused, considering it. “Never mind,” he grumbled. “That one would make me sound like a psycho, too.

Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.

Why do people not confess vices? It is because they have not yet laid them aside. It is a waking person only who can tell their dreams.

What terrible fear causes Man to address the Void as Thou?

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

Should we be mindful of dreams?" Joseph asked. "Can we interpret them?" The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: "We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything.

The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.

Frankly, I kind of want you to be haunted by the unansweredness of the question, because I think being haunted by such things is a valuable part of being a person.

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.