Bakhtin Carnival Quotes & Sayings

What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back. — Haruki Murakami

everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people (including age). All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Deeply ambivalent also is carnival laughter itself. Genetically it is linked with the most ancient forms of ritual laughter. Ritual laughter was always directed toward something higher: the sun (the highest god), other gods, the highest earthly authority were put to shame and ridiculed to force them to renew themselves. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Carnival is past millennia's way of sensing the world as one great communal performance. This sense of the world, liberating one from fear, bringing the world maximally close to a person and bringing one person maximally close to another (everything is drawn into the zone of free familiar contact), with its joy at change and its joyful relativity, is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order. From precisely that sort of seriousness did the carnival sense of the world liberate man. — Mikhail Bakhtin

There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Celebrity' is sort of an idea. I mean, I get to do something extraordinary, but I don't think it makes me extraordinary. That's my opinion. I like to be an artist; I like to do things that are involved in the arts, but I don't think it makes me more special than a doctor, for example. A doctor is an extraordinary person. — Justin Timberlake

The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way. — Mikhail Bakhtin

A collector is anxious to acquire specimens to illustrate a period or a school, and forgets that a single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school. We classify too much and enjoy too little. The sacrifice of the aesthetic to the so-called scientific method of exhibition has been the bane of many museums. — Kakuzo Okakura

Everyone loves a comedy, my dear. It is divine. — Rawi Hage

You tempt the devil," he whispered then laid his head down and sighed. "Angels always do. — Bijou Hunter

No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet, — E. O. Wilson

Running won't change your life, just the way you live it. — Robert Andrew Powell

A loser says that's the way it's always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way. — Sydney J. Harris

After being in the studio, I realized this is how I want to be. It just feels right. — Aurora Aksnes

The primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king. — Mikhail Bakhtin

I've always felt that night doesn't fall. Night rises. There are these incidences in flying where you just sit there. It's one of the best seats in the house. — James Turrell

Carnival laughter does not permit a single one of these aspects of change to be absolutized or to congeal in one-sided seriousness. — Mikhail Bakhtin

One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it. — Virginia Woolf

All the images of carnival are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis: birth and death (the image of pregnant death), blessing and curse (benedictory carnival curses which call simultaneously for death and rebirth), praise and abuse, youth and old age, top and bottom, face and backside, stupidity and wisdom. — Mikhail Bakhtin