Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
Interpretation
Individual talents can be admirable, but when combined without harmony, they can create a chaotic outcome.
This quote highlights the idea that while everyone possesses unique skills and talents, the lack of collaboration and cohesion can lead to disarray rather than a harmonious whole. It suggests that true artistry and effectiveness come from unity and cooperation, not merely individual excellence.
In practice
This quote could be used in a team-building workshop to emphasize the importance of collaboration.
In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.
When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
One can rightly speak of an evolution in plastic art. It is of the greatest importance to note this fact, for it reveals the true way of art - the only path along which we can advance.
My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.
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