A Quote by Gunter Grass
Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.
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Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. It's not God in his heaven who sees everything. A kitchen chair, a clothes hanger, a half-filled ashtray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can serve perfectly well as an unforgetting witness to our every deed.
The kids of today have to be better than us. We must strive to create tools adequate for human beings that come with other things that are, at least, different from those we used to have.
And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.
There's nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That's the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn't really mourn for that - it's too disturbing, seems like a mistake.
Today I felt like a part of something awesome, the human race. I know it can be ugly; it really is in so many ways. But today there was nothing ugly to see, just people trying to be better. And maybe that's the key. Not resolutions and forgotten promises, but instead a commitment to do this year a little better than the last. I'm feeling good about this one. I really am.
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
You have to remember that actors are human beings. Which is hard sometimes because they look so much better than human beings.
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know - even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction - than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.
Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
I believe in my children. I believe in human beings. I believe in the goodness that is in human beings. I believe in many, many things that I cannot prove. I believe that there's the world of the seen and the world of the unseen.
Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.
When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts ... Who knows what use they’ll make of you? Maybe you’ll help them to persuade people to buy things they don’t need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them.
I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.
Do we want to know whether Christ was resurrected on Easter? God provides the grace to believe in that, but note: Such belief requires less faith in things unseen than believing that the world as we know it evolved out of nothing.
In a fragment of a second you can understand: Things you know, things you don’t know, things you don’t know that you don’t know, conscious, unconscious, things which in a fragrant of a second you can react to: we can all imagine why this capacity was given to us as human beings - I guess to survive. Architecture to me has the same kind of capacity. It takes longer to capture, but the essence to me is the same. I call this atmosphere. When you experience a building and it gets to you. It sticks in your memory and your feelings. I guess thats what I am trying to do.
As far as Death was aware, the sole reason for any human association with pigs and lambs was as a prelude to chops and sausages. Quite why they should dress up for children’s wallpaper as well was a mystery. Hello, little folk, this is what you’re going to eat… He felt that if only he could find the key to it, he’d know a lot more about human beings.
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