Hugo Ball Quotes

Hugo Ball presents witty, critical musings on art and society that challenge conventional views.

11 quotes

1. It is true that for us art is not an end in itself, we have lost too many of our illusions for that. Art is for us an occasion for social criticism, and for real understanding of the age we live in...Dada was not a school of artists, but an alarm signal against declining values, routine and speculations, a desperate appeal, on behalf of all forms of art, for a creative basis on which to build a new and universal consciousness of art.

2. No such thing as humanity without flaws.

3. Everywhere, the ethical predicament of our time imposes itself with an urgency which suggests that even the question Have we anything to eat? will be answered not in material but in ethical terms.

4. Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.

5. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own.

6. We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

7. The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

8. It's inspiration that counts, not the drill.

9. What is generally termed reality is, to be precise, a frothy nothing.

10. “Every word that is spoken and sung here (the Cabaret Voltaire) represents at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”

11. “The artist’s secret lies in fear and awe. Our times have turned them into terror and dismay.”