Top 250 Brian Eno Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.”

— Brian Eno

52. “I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.”

— Brian Eno

53. “Honor your mistake as a hidden intention.”

— Brian Eno

54. “Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.”

— Brian Eno

55. “It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.”

— Brian Eno

56. “John Cage made you realise that there wasn’t a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn’t appreciated.”

— Brian Eno

57. “I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.”

— Brian Eno

58. “The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.”

— Brian Eno

59. “You talk to me as if from a distance And I reply with impressions chosen from another time.”

— Brian Eno

60. “The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.”

— Brian Eno

61. “Given the chance, i’ll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season’s over.”

— Brian Eno

62. “My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.”

— Brian Eno

63. “Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.”

— Brian Eno

64. “Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.”

— Brian Eno

65. “Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.”

— Brian Eno

66. “My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.”

— Brian Eno

67. “The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement.”

— Brian Eno

68. “Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.”

— Brian Eno

69. “The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.”

— Brian Eno

70. “Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that s already inside it but something that happens inside you.”

— Brian Eno

71. “At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.”

— Brian Eno

72. “When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.”

— Brian Eno

73. “Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to – all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.”

— Brian Eno

74. “Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.”

— Brian Eno

75. “I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.”

— Brian Eno

76. “It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.”

— Brian Eno

77. “Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.”

— Brian Eno

78. “I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I’ve never been interested in that.”

— Brian Eno

79. “Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future.”

— Brian Eno

80. “I’m kind of an evangelical atheist.”

— Brian Eno

81. “People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.”

— Brian Eno

82. “I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you’re hearing. I don’t use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones.”

— Brian Eno

83. “You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I’m obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.”

— Brian Eno

84. “I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It’s by the sea, there’s a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.”

— Brian Eno

85. “I’d rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.”

— Brian Eno

86. “If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.”

— Brian Eno

87. “Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.”

— Brian Eno

88. “Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.”

— Brian Eno

89. “Law is always better than war.”

— Brian Eno

90. “Reggie Watts is a most unusual talent: a huge vocal range, a natural musicality, and a sidesplitting wit. Is he a comedian? A singer? A performance artist? I’ve seen him a few times since then and I still can’t decide. Whatever, he ain’t like nobody else.”

— Brian Eno

91. “The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.”

— Brian Eno

92. “Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.”

— Brian Eno

93. “Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, “Well, if everyone likes it it can’t be that good.” Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.”

— Brian Eno

94. “I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.”

— Brian Eno

95. “More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.”

— Brian Eno

96. “It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don’t sell that many records.”

— Brian Eno

97. “All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.”

— Brian Eno

98. “In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person.”

— Brian Eno

99. “I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.”

— Brian Eno

100. “If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.”

— Brian Eno