What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?
Interpretation
This quote questions the essence of existence and value beyond the surface.
Bertolt Brecht's quote, 'What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?' invites contemplation on the nature of absence and presence. It suggests that when something that defines or gives context to a situation is removed, one must consider what remains and how our perception of value or existence is intertwined with what is missing, thereby prompting a deeper reflection on dependency and identity.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.
Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.
One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
If you can see the terrorists as a relative who's dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine and the medicine is love and compassion. There's nothing better.
Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.
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