"There are no more geniuses, only critics."

Arnold Schoenberg Music See all quotes by Arnold Schoenberg →

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“My works are 12-tone compositions, not 12-tone compositions”

“I see the work as a whole first. Then I compose the details. In working out, I always lose something. This cannot be avoided. There is always some loss when we materialize. But there is compensating gain in vitality.”

“I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.”

“I find above all that the expression, "atonal music," is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying "the art of not falling," or swimming "the art of not drowning.”

“Now we will throw these mediocre kitsch-mongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.”

“I have just read your book from cover to cover, and I will read it once more. I find it pleasing to an extraordinary degree, because we agree on nearly all of the main issues..”

Resonant Thoughts

"What is happening in India is a mighty creative process.... But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening. Deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging to their historical humiliat…"

— V. S. Naipaul

Literature1932–2018

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"An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country."

— George Bernard Shaw

Literature1856–1950

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"The prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family. It is an act that has something about it of ritual thaumaturgy—at the beginning of our intellect…"

— Lionel Trilling

Literature1905–1975

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