Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.
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Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
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[Of music]. Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found and shall not find.
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When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.
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Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.
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To produce music is also in a sense to produce children.
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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven’s Ninth, Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles’White Album?
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Music quickens time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time.
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Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.
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[Music] takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
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As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes.
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Music was invented to.confirm human loneliness.
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Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite.
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Where there’s music there can be no evil.
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To know whether you are enjoying a piece of music or not you must see whether you find yourself looking at the advertisements of Pear’s soap at the end of the program.
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Oh! there is an organ playing in the street—a waltz too! I must leave off to listen.
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Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore to such as are discontent, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected, it is a most present remedy.
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The most excising rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.
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The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
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Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life.
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A mind too proud to unbend oyer the small ridicu- losa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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’Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.
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There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.
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All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.
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Now let the weeping cease; / Let no one mourn again. / These things are in the hands of God.
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“Clutch your chest. Fall off that horse,” they directed. That was it. Death was the extent of Indian acting in the movie theater.
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Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast, / When husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last.
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What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.
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To weep excessively for the dead is to affront the living.
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The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.
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The vastest earthly Day / Is shrunken small / By one Defaulting Face / Behind a Pall.
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Let mourning stop when one’s grief is fully expressed.
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The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.
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Ah! surely Nothing dies but Something mourns!
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Men can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immedi-
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The Light of Lights / Looks always on the motive, not the deed, / The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
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A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.
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He advised people to have intellect, and to look beneath what he called “the epithelium of things,” though he did discourage scrutiny of his own motives.
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I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do.
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For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.
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Our life’s a moment and less than a moment, but even this mite nature has mockingly humored with some appearance of a longer span.
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Mortality has its compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come. 1
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To venerate the simple days / Which lead the seasons by, / Needs but to remember / That from you or
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One thing is certain and the rest is Lies; /The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.
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