Hugo Ball Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

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.

Hugo Ball

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

Hugo Ball

It is true that for us art is not an end in itself, we have lost too many of our illusions for that. Art is for us an occasion for social criticism, and for real understanding of the age we live in... Dada was not a school of artists, but an alarm signal against declining values, routine and speculations, a desperate appeal, on behalf of all forms of art, for a creative basis on which to build a new and universal consciousness of art.

Hugo Ball

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.

Hugo Ball

Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.

Hugo Ball

Hugo Ball

Hugo Ball

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Born: February 22, 1886

Died: September 14, 1927 (aged 41)

Bio: Hugo Ball was a German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists.

Known for:

Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary
Flametti (1918)
Tenderenda, der Phantast
Dada Manifesto
Critique of the German Intelligentsia

Hugo Ball on Wikipedia

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