Quotes by Composers - Page 10

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.
Anthony Burgess
To dispense knowledge without moral guidance would be grossly irresponsible.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything . It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me. I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed, to my face, as a thief, as a liar, and slanderer.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned.
Frank Zappa
I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.
Noël Coward
It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Noël Coward
I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist... This movie [Agora] is about fundamentalism and hate.
Alejandro Amenábar
Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.
Anthony Burgess
They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
Thelonious Monk
You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.
Paul Bowles
I've been told, by various people, that I think too much. This is incorrect! The truth is that I deliberately challenge people to think more than they would like to.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroying, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were he in the tyrant's place, would intensify the torments of his enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed everyday on his orders. Nature, in giving men tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] Mandeville has a clear awareness that, with all their mores, men would never have been anything but monsters, if nature had not given them pity to aid their reason; but he has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that he wants to deny in men. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that he be happy?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
...an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Minister: As I was saying, Alex, you can be instrumental in changing the public verdict. Do you understand, Alex? Have I made myself clear?Alex: As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer. You can rely on me, Fred.
Anthony Burgess
Sarcasm is a manifestation of anger, and anger can make you the puppet of your opponents.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Yuh cyah vex when soca playin
Wayne Gerard Trotman
...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.
Hector Berlioz
...he refused to consider the Moroccans' present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition, that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition.
Paul Bowles
Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it’s pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let’s say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.”“Yes, yes, yes, I know,” Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. “As far as I’m concerned that’s just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I’m trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it’s his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it’s at the end of its rope. He can’t expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it’s his only hope, the only way out—if there is one for him personally, which I doubt.
Paul Bowles
First of all I express sincerity. There's also that sense of humor, by which people sometimes learn to laugh about themselves. I mean, the situation is so serious that the people could go crazy because of it. They need to smile and realize how ridiculous everything is. A race without a sense of humor is in bad shape. A race needs clowns. In earlier days people knew that. Kings always had a court jester around. In that way he was always reminded how ridiculous things are. I believe that nations too should have jesters, in the congress, near the president, everywhere.....You could call me the jester of the Creator. The whole world, all the disease and misery, it's all ridiculous.
Sun Ra
Of course I do, Jack! You have to beLIEve me!
Raymond Benson
And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you...
Tom Waits
Maybe I'd see how you could be so certain that we had no chance...at all.
Jason Robert Brown
A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.
Anthony Burgess
Humor is a universal lanuage.
Joel Goodman
The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.
William Herschel
With experience comes improvement.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
May the scribes record it.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
The eternal sea of politics is best left to politicians.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
May it be written. May it be done.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Fear sees, even when eyes are closed.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Death whispers your name to me.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I see you have returned, my love; and your mood is as dark as ever. Did your soldiers not adore you to your complete satisfaction?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Verily, a man without fear is either dead or happy to die.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Burying your head in the sand does not make you invisible it only leads to suffocation.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Asleep you can experience many hours whilst only a few waking moments have passed. This is why dreams are an ideal platform for training.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
It would not do to be Lord of a universe inhabited solely by serfs.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
By the time I had complete my 22nd year, I was a new man - an atheist.
Béla Bartók
Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.
Anthony Burgess
Do not dismiss the words of the old; they possess wisdom, which comes only with age, and often speak of things that the young are too immature to understand.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Would you teach me, Seth?’Seth smiled and leaned back in his seat. ‘You do realise, of course, that you have no idea what you ask of me?’ Seth replied after a moment.‘Of course,’ Christopher replied quietly. ‘Could you tell me?’‘No. That is the problem you see,’ Seth said. ‘Magic is something you can never prepare someone for. Magic will make you, Christopher. It will find all the secret empty places of longing in you and fill them more surely than any other love. And magic will break your heart.’ A slight, rather sad smile crossed Christopher’s face for a moment. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You think your heart is already broken, you think that this crooked and winding way is the only path left for you now. But you’re wrong. The heart breaks like every wave on the beach and there’s a darkness you’ll have to pass through that you can’t even see from where you are now.
Lee Morgan
It was obvious from their expressions that they believed the wellbeing of R.’s inhabitants was endangered by my youth. The visit was very enjoyable, but the horror of the previous night still clung to me.
E.T.A. Hoffmann
What’s the old saying? Ah, I remember now. ‘Curiosity flayed the cat alive, ripped it apart limb from limb, and listened to it scream before it killed it.’ That’s the one.
Simon Holt
Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Growth of consciousness does not depend on the might of the intellect but on the conviction of the heart.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.
Jaron Lanier
I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.
Glenn Gould
By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Anthony Burgess
Love can give you such happiness, then can break the very heart it filled, leaving a hole that can never be fixed or protected by any armour.
Kevin McLeod
What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.
Jaron Lanier
Armon stared into the wild darkness of his opponent and saw a reflection of his own fall.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
If you’ve never been in a men’s room, and have only set foot in the ladies’ room at most fine (and not so fine) establishments, you need to know this: store owners hate men. No, really—this is the one area where women get treated better. We may earn seventy-seven cents on the dollar compared to men, but, by God, our public bathrooms don’t look like something out of a Soviet-era prison. Or worse—a Sochi hotel during the Olympics.
Julia Kent
If I had echolocation I could map out the terrain of ab muscles through sheer force of will. His cut body is meant to be relief mapped the way Braille is meant to be read. With my fingertips.
Julia Kent
Josh is the company tech expert, which means we all think he’s a little bit shaman, a little bit magician, and mostly a nerd.
Julia Kent
People who think animals have expressionless faces are like people who can ignore an open package of Oreos. Not quite human.
Julia Kent
Weird is just a side-effect of being awesome!
Jean Gilbert
Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
Aaron Copland
My boyfriend dumped me. My best friend won't talk to me. My future is in a garbage can. Everything has turned to crap. Can you please just let me be a sullen teenager. just this once
J.J. Johnson
As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is “AUTHENTICITY”.As I began to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody if I try to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this person was me. Today I call it “RESPECT”.As I began to love myself I stopped craving for a different life, and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow. Today I call it “MATURITY”.As I began to love myself I understood that at any circumstance, I am in the right place at the right time, and everything happens at the exactly right moment. So I could be calm. Today I call it “SELF-CONFIDENCE”.As I began to love myself I quit stealing my own time, and I stopped designing huge projects for the future. Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness, things I love to do and that make my heart cheer, and I do them in my own way and in my own rhythm. Today I call it “SIMPLICITY”.As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for my health – food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today I know it is “LOVE OF ONESELF”.As I began to love myself I quit trying to always be right, and ever since I was wrong less of the time. Today I discovered that is “MODESTY”.As I began to love myself I refused to go on living in the past and worrying about the future. Now, I only live for the moment, where everything is happening. Today I live each day, day by day, and I call it “FULFILLMENT”.As I began to love myself I recognized that my mind can disturb me and it can make me sick. But as I connected it to my heart, my mind became a valuable ally. Today I call this connection “WISDOM OF THE HEART”.We no longer need to fear arguments, confrontations or any kind of problems with ourselves or others. Even stars collide, and out of their crashing new worlds are born. Today I know “THAT IS LIFE”!
Charlie Chaplin
Honor your mistake as a hidden intention.
Brian Eno