Hugo Ball Quotes

#1. It's inspiration that counts, not the drill.

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

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#3. 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.

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#4. Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?

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#5. 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.

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#6. No such thing as humanity without flaws.

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#7. 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.

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#8. Punctuality can go to the devil.

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

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#10. 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.

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