Weekend Words: Rejection
This week, in honor of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, Weekend Words considers rejection.
On Thursday, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (August 22, 1928–December 5, 2007), one of the most influential musical figures of the 20th century, would have turned 85.
“Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something,” he once said, “the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc., was that they rejected it.”
“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”
—Thomas Wolfe
“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.”
—Isaiah, 53:2
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
—Marcus Aurelius
“Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.”
—Sigmund Freud
“Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker.”
—Mikhail Bakunin
“Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide.”
—Philip Larkin
