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“Her playing which had been superb became merely correct. It was necessary to suggest a certain sloppiness, the playing of something that hadn't been written. Computer-made music-synthesized Blue Moon- presented same problem. Random elements introduced.”
― John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

“Helene's interest in economics had waned considerably over the years. More and more, the theories that tried to explain economic phenomena, to predict their developments, appeared almost equally inconsistent and random. She was more and more tempted to liken them to pure and simple charlatanism; it was even surprising, she occasionally thought, that they gave a Nobel Prize for economics, as if this discipline could boast the same methodological seriousness, the same intellectual rigor, as chemistry, or physics. And her interest in teaching had also waned considerably. On the whole, young people no longer interested her much. Her students were at such a terrifyingly low intellectual level that, sometimes, you had to wonder what had pushed them into studying in the first place. The only reply, she knew in her heart of hearts, was that they wanted to make money, as much money as possible; aside from a few short-term humanitarian fads, that was the only thing that really got them going. Her professional life could thus be summarized as teaching contradictory absurdities to social-climbing cretins, even if she avoided formulating it to herself in terms that stark.”
― Michel Houellebecq, La carte et le territoire

“Every inventor, every man of originality has been religious and even fanatically so. Perverted by irreligious skepticism, the human mind is like waste land that produces nothing or is covered with weeds useless to man. At such a time even its natural fertility is an evil, for these weeds harden the soil by tangling and intertwining their roots and moreover create a barrier between the sky and the earth. Break up these accursed clods; destroy these fatally hardy weeds; call on every human aid; drive in the plow; dig deep to bring into contact the powers of the earth and the powers of the sky.
Here, gentlemen, is the natural analogy to human intelligence opened or closed to divine knowledge.
The natural sciences themselves are subject to the general law. Genius does not rely much on the slow crawl of logic. Its gait is free, its manner derives from inspiration; one can see its success, but no one has seen its progress....”
― Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence

“Yet we must know, if only in order to learn not to known. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere. That is, how to live dynamically, from the great Source, and not statically, like machines driven by ideas and principles from the head, or automatically from one fixed desire. At last, knowledge must be put into its true place in the living activity of man. And we must know deeply, in order to do that.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious