We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Brian EnoRead
I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Both religion and art fulfill a deep human need for surrender and connection.
Brian Eno's quote suggests that both religion and art serve a fundamental purpose in human life—addressing a collective yearning for surrender and a deeper understanding of existence. He argues that while they are not identical, the psychological and emotional needs they fulfill are strikingly similar, indicating a profound link between spiritual and artistic experiences.
Themes
ArtReligionSurrenderHuman ExperienceConnection
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the emotional impact of art, this quote can highlight the deeper significance of artistic expression.
More from Brian Eno
All quotes →I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
Brian EnoRead
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
Brian EnoRead
People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
Brian EnoRead
In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
Brian EnoRead
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Brian EnoRead
Similar quotes
One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that's just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%.
Randall MunroeRead
The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.
Steven SpielbergRead
I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.
James TurrellRead
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
Roger ScrutonRead
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
T. S. EliotRead
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
Anne SextonRead