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
Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Rationality helps us understand and predict the world, while art prepares us for the unpredictability of life.
In this quote, Brian Eno highlights the contrast between rationality and art. Rationality serves as a tool for organizing our understanding of the world, enabling us to make predictions and navigate through life with structure. However, art represents the human experience of uncertainty and the limitations of that rational framework, suggesting that there are aspects of life that escape rational organization, requiring us to embrace creativity and the unpredictable nature of existence.
Themes
RationalityArtCreativityPredictabilityProcessFailure
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of creativity in education, you might say, 'As Brian Eno stated, art prepares us for the unpredictability of life.'
More from Brian Eno
All quotes βI 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
But once you've made a song and you put it out there, you don't own it anymore. The public own it. It's their song. It might be their song that they wake up to, or their song they have a shower to, or their song that they drive home to or their song they cry to, scream to, have babies to, have weddings to - like, it isn't your song anymore.
Ed SheeranRead
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.
Claude MonetRead
I was lucky: I feel like I've written four books that mean something to me, and one book that means everything to me, and that's 'The Book Thief.'
Markus ZusakRead
Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.
Gunter GrassRead
On Creating β What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.
Emile M. CioranRead
After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction
Alice HoffmanRead