Quote: Foucault

Question: When did you stop believing in 'meaning?'
Foucault: The break came the day that Levi-Strauss demonstrated - about societies - and Lacan demonstrated - about the unconscious - that 'meaning' was probably only a sort of surface effect, a shimmer, a foam, and that what ran through us, underlay us, and was before us, what sustained us in time or space, was the system ...
Question: But, then, who secretes this system?
Foucault: What is this anonymous system without a subject, what thinks? The 'I' has exploded - we see this in modern literature - this is the discovery of 'there is.' There is a one. In some ways, one comes back to the seventeenth-century point of view, with this difference: not setting man, but anonymous thought, knowledge without subject, theory with no identity, in God's place.

Interview with Michel Foucault in La Quinzaine litteraire, 1966; in 'Claude Levi-Strauss, The Father of Modern Anthropology,' Patrick Wilcken, 2010

Quote: Agnes Martin

’There are no valid thoughts about art. If your sensibilities are awake you will respond. It will be a pleasant experience recalling happy times.. You must see that no talking will help and that no defence is necessary ...’

From ‘Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art,’ by Nancy Princenthal

Quote: Stephen Nachmanovitch

‘... intuition computes concentrically.’

From ‘Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art’

Quote: Martha Graham

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

Excerpt in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Quote: William James

‘The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It ‘becomes’ true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its ‘verification.’ Its validity is the process of its ‘validation.’ ‘

From the Preface to ‘The Meaning of Truth,’ 1909.

Quote: Gregory Bateson

"... mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; ... its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct."

from Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972

Quote: Gaston Bachelard

"The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness"

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie

Quote: Hans Loewald

" ... analysts all too frequently fall into the error of regarding fantasy as being opposed to reality, as something to be eventually discarded or relegated to a psychic enclave.  But fantasy is unreal only insofar as its communication with present actuality is inhibited or severed.  To that extent, however, present actuality is unreal too.  Perhaps a better word than 'unreal' is 'meaningless'"

from 'Psychoanalysis as an Art' in Papers on Psychoanalysis (1980)

Quote: Eileen Myles

"Rumi had someone following him around all day long, while he spoke the poem.  He was simply in it.  I was in it too. The room was the poem, the day I was in.  Oh Christ.  What writes my poem is a second ring, inner or outer.  Poetry is just the performance of it.  These little things, whether I write them or not.  That's the score.  The thing of great value is you.  Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live."

from Inferno: (A Poet's Novel) 2010

Quote: Tennessee Williams

'Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.'

from 'The Night of the Iguana'

Quote: Zora Neale Hurston

"If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it."

Quote: BF Skinner

"The difference between rats and people is that when a rat gets shocked at one end of a maze, he never goes there again."

Harvard College Lecture, 1959

Quote: Karl Ove Knausgaard

'Knowledge ... is the enemy of meaning.'

from Book 1 of My Struggle

Quote: Salvador Dali

"The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad."

James Jones extends attachment theory to religion ...

"If our psychology is inherently relational, it is not antipsychological to see reality as interrelated.  If there is no escaping dependency on a self-object milieu, there is nothing childish about acknowledging connection to a self-sustaining universal matrix.  If selves necessarily stand in relation, it is not necessarily irrational to ask if this complex of selves in relation does not itself stand in relation." 

From Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Religion

Quote: Adam Phillips

"We must learn to desire with guile and without hope; to love in conflict, rather than betraying our desire in fantasies of harmony."

from 'The Master Mind Lectures' in Side Effects, 2006

Quote: Stephen de Staebler

"The performance, the process of making anything - and most certainly art - is the art.  The resulting object commemorates the event."

Quote: Gregory Bateson

"It takes two to know one."

Quote: Witold Gombrowicz

"Art consists of writing not what one has to say, but something altogether unexpected."

Quote: Kafka

"Beyond a certain point there's no return.  That's the point that must be reached."