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REFLECTIONS ON CLOWNING

Your quotes, poems or inspired writingsPicsArt_1420383311355

These thoughts and quotes all reflect the spirit of clowning and aspects of our work. You may know of others or may have recently come across something you wish to share. If so, send it to us with the source reference, your name and a brief reason for its inclusion and we will put it on this page.

GK Chesterton

“In everything that yields gracefully, there must be resistance. Bows are beautiful when they bend only because they seek to remain rigid. Rigidity that slightly yields, like justice swayed by pity, is all the beauty of earth. Everything seeks to grow straight, and happily, nothing succeeds in so growing. Try to grow straight and life will bend you.”

Agnes DeMille

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
Sent by Angie Foster – Oct 08

Miles DavisPicsArt_1420377130848

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Friedrich Schiller

Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.

Niels Bohr

“The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity of the other side of complexity.

M. C. Richards

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, in Free Play (1990)PicsArt_1420377606900

If the oyster had hands, there would be no pearl.

Edgar Degas

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Henry Miller “The smile at the foot of the ladder”

“A clown is a poet in action. He is the story which he enacts.
The clown teaches us to laugh at ourselves.
Joy is like a river : it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me that this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through the ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyse, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically.”

A. Simon “La planète des clowns”

“The art of the clown consists of freeing ourselves from all roles except one : Our own. ”

Stephen Nachmanovitch, in Free Play (1990)

The only road to strength is through vulnerability.

Victor Borge

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people”

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