Manfred Eigen Quotes

Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.

Sometimes people invent things because they want to stay alive or feed their children or conquer the village next door. But just as often, new ideas come into the world simply because they're fun. And here's the really strange thing: many of those playful but seemingly frivolous inventions ended up sparking momentous transformations in science, in politics and society.

The walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight.

The purpose of art is the fight for freedom.

I've been super lucky in that I've either been in or helped create situations where I do what I want. I'm super lucky. I get to do what I want and create art and make people laugh, and it's really fun.

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.

Play is a necessary ingredient in art because there is a kind of wonder that goes on when you play. You're directing your activity toward a conclusion that isn't prescribed by a particular method.

To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom.

There's this idea like feminism is humorless and humorless in a way that's like a whistleblower. Like you're going to - you're going to make sure that nobody has any fun. And that's not true at all. I think feminism allows me to do what I do, and I'm so grateful to the idea of it and grateful to all the women that came before.

Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.

Games are nature's most beautiful creation

Most people spend their lives on their endeavors, and I get the privilege to have been doing this since I was five. I get to go play and have fun and entertain people.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty.

We want to remember to be playful! We're here in this wonderful and incredible world! Like, the grand architect of the universe created this playground. And we're supposed to have fun, and we're supposed to play.

I can assure you, that once you get rid of the notion of art, you acquire a great many wonderful new freedoms.

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

I see the canvas and I begin... It's a necessary evil to get into the work, and it's pretty marvelous to be able to get out of it.

Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty...in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.

A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).

Art is the imagination at play in the field of time. Let yourself play.

Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance.