Creativity Quote by Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet frames comfort as a slow death, and he does it with the blunt, almost punitive logic of an artist who spent his career distrusting “good taste.” The line reads like a travel slogan at first, but the stakes are harsher: if you don’t break from what you love, you don’t preserve it - you fossilize inside it. “Goodbye” isn’t heartbreak here; it’s a necessary violence, the cut that keeps the self from calcifying into a predictable style, a predictable life.

The repetition of “unless” works like a gatekeeper. No loopholes, no gentle compromise. Dubuffet isn’t praising novelty for novelty’s sake; he’s warning about the default setting of adulthood: repetition disguised as stability. “Completely new territories” can be literal movement, but for an artist it’s more pointed: new materials, new subjects, new ways of seeing that risk embarrassment. That risk is the hidden engine of the quote. Dubuffet built his reputation on Art Brut, championing work that looked untrained, even “wrong,” because the polished and sanctioned often felt dead on arrival.

“Long wearing away” is a brutal phrase because it’s passive. You don’t implode; you erode. The subtext is anti-romantic: extinction doesn’t come from tragedy, it comes from avoiding rupture. In the postwar cultural landscape where institutions were busy re-establishing norms, Dubuffet’s insistence on departure reads as both personal ethic and aesthetic insurgency: leave what you adore, or it will quietly finish you.