Francis M. Naumann: Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

"The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves."

"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

"I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”

Park Min-Gyu: Pavane for a Dead Princess

I froze. How do I describe how I felt when I first saw her? It was like how I'd feel sitting in front of my TV, eating curry and watching the same music program I watch every Saturday that features the same batch of young pop stars and R&B singers, listening to the audience clapping and the same host introducing the next artist, with everything as it should be, when, suddenly, an old middle-aged guy takes the stage and starts yodeling, "Yodel-ay-ee-yo, lay-ee-yo, lay-ee-yodel-ee!"

Patrick Leigh Fermour: Between the Woods and the Water

Scattered with poppies, the golden-green waves of the cornfields faded. The red sun seemed to tip one end of a pair of scales below the horizon, and simultaneously to lift an orange moon at the other. Only two days off the full, it rose behind a wood, swiftly losing its flush as it floated up, until the wheat loomed out of the twilight like a metallic and prickly sea.

Christophe Andre: Looking at Mindfulness: 25 Ways to Live in the Moment Through Art

Like a swimmer who stops swimming for a moment to be carried by the current. This is not passivity, but presence.

Alex Kovacs: The Currency of Paper

The consequence of a society that places money at its centre is that forms of mental and physical slavery come to dominate human life.

The vast majority of ways in which money circulates have enormously destructive consequences. Human relationships inevitably suffer as a result, becoming insipid, superficial, mechanical reductions of what is possible. Tenderness is rarely achieved on the scale it could be because individuals are trapped within the structures of employment. In the current system most human beings have little knoledge of the full spectrum of the emotional and intellectual vocabulary that the species is capable of achieving.

Any free thinking individual must do everything within their power to escape the obscene working conditions that prevail in the free-market system. This is equivalent to, and no less imperative than, for example, fleeing your country because it has descended into war.

When money is the sole objective of an action, a certain degree of idiocy is inevitable.

The horror of menial work as currently practised should not be underestimated. To spend forty hours a week or more engaged in unceasing cycles of senseless repetition, as do most human beings, is a destructive form of existence for anyone to have to endure.


... bitter flavours gathered in the back of the mouth... the constricting and malevolent influence of a society that is in essence corrupt... the ever-present likelihood of wodespread annihilation... the talk of the town that amounts to so very little... falling into a permanent state of degradation... the fashioning of a fastidious brutality... the achievement of efficiency at any price...