What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?
Interpretation
This quote questions the essence of existence and value beyond the surface.
Bertolt Brecht's quote, 'What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?' invites contemplation on the nature of absence and presence. It suggests that when something that defines or gives context to a situation is removed, one must consider what remains and how our perception of value or existence is intertwined with what is missing, thereby prompting a deeper reflection on dependency and identity.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
Understand that we are all co-creators of our respective destinies.
It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.
It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.
Choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions.
A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
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