Brian Eno

Brian Eno

"Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it."
33 Quotes
"Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it."
Brian Eno
"I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes."
Brian Eno
"It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene."
Brian Eno
"Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to."
Brian Eno
"You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else."
Brian Eno
"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 Eno
"I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet. I think that's sort of a characteristic of the way I've worked ever since I started."
Brian Eno
"You can't really imagine music without technology."
Brian Eno
"I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet."
Brian Eno
"I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement."
Brian Eno
"I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's."
Brian Eno
"I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me."
Brian Eno
"When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue."
Brian Eno
"When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind."
Brian Eno
"One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better."
Brian Eno
"I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender."
Brian Eno
"If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas."
Brian Eno
"I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function."
Brian Eno
"When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks."
Brian Eno
"The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else."
Brian Eno
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