"was the same as I was to experience a few years later when I first laid eyes on a Mondriaan canvas...: those things, of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality"

Anton Webern Music See all quotes by Anton Webern →

React to this quote

More by Anton Webern

“Webern attracts me, though there's a lot that I don't understand. His music is a combination of purity, complexity and abstraction in the very best sense of the term.”

“Except for the violin pieces and a few of my orchestra pieces, all of my works from the Passacaglia on relate to the death of my mother.”

“Music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing.”

“Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man tr…"

— Albert Einstein

Science1879–1955

#knowledge

"[T]ruly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is clos…"

— Michel Foucault

Literature1926–1984

#philosophy

"Undoubtedly, one comes closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and nobles. But precisely because such an …"

— Czesław Miłosz

Literature1911–2004

#knowledge

"When the real nature of things becomes clear to the meditating Bikshu, then all his doubts fade away since he has learned what is that nature and what it's cause. From ignorance spring all the evils. …"

— Gautama Buddha

Philosophy-563–-483

#knowledge