Paul Gauguin Quotes

Historically, if you look at great civilizations, why do they crumble? Is it because of what's outside or because of something internal? It's always internal. It is.

The status quo leads to self-destruction.

Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder

… the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.

Taking it easy is often the prelude to backsliding. Comfort precedes collapse.

The stationary condition is the beginning of the end

Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.

Change is almost always negative. Things degenerate.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.

Things seem to fall apart inevitably.

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

If you stand still long enough, you'll get stuck.

The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.

When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.

Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

Many a false step is made standing still.

There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, "Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward." And that's a difficult part.

The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the landscape leads us in the direction of disorder and death. They are categorically evil. These dispositions are destroying our only home-planet and other organisms that share it. They defeat our need to care about where we are and the things in place there. They prompt us to feel that civilization is not worth carrying on. They rob us of our identity and our will to live. These things are not about personal taste or style.