Quotes by Composers - Page 6

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
Frank Zappa
Envy yearns to find flaws.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Envy suggests inferiority.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Laughter is much better than anger.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Water - a thoroughly underrated drink.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
Noël Coward
Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dance for yourself. If someone understands, good. If not, no matter. Go right on doing what interests you, and do it until it stops interesting you.
Louis Horst
People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
You’ve been smoking again, haven’t you? Your eyes look like road maps and you’re in full bastard mode.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
[T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Parsifal is on his way to the temple of the Grail Knights and says: “I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come”, and the all-knowing Gurnemanz replies: “You see, my son, time turns here into space
Richard Wagner
the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind . . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.
Paul Bowles
How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.
Paul Bowles
He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.
Paul Bowles
The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous, with its own necessities and patterns. The message they were beating out, over and over, was for her; it was saying, not precisely that she did not exist but rather that it did not matter whether she existed or not, that her presence was of no consequence to the rest of the cosmos. It was a sensation that suddenly paralyzed her with dread. There had never been any question of her “mattering”; it went without saying that she mattered, because she was important to herself. But what was the part of her to which she mattered?
Paul Bowles
I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion. . . . I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste.
Georges Bizet
Instead of loving people and using money, people often love money and use people.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end.
Richard Strauss
A critic can call any poem 'doggerel.' That is no more than a slur. 'Doggerel' or 'maudlin' or 'sappy' or 'sentimental' is in the ear of the listener. By the by, 'sentimental' is okay as it is defined as 'marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism.' It is 'sentimentality' that is to be avoided, like the fiddleback spider, being as it is 'the quality or state of being sentimental to excess or in affectation.' Again we are faced with a judgement call and must keep a sharp eye on our outpourings to insure they are not overly gooey.The intellectual elite probably believe that most of the lyrics songwriters create are 'doggerel' of one kind or another--that is to say 'trivial"......the young songwriter has now been warned about the implacable nature of the enemy. Under a rather large umbrella, preferred twentieth-century taste in art of all kinds has been characterized by a kind of detachment, or sangfroid. It is simply not chic to be carried away in one's emotional reaction to a subject. All serious communication or complaint must be carefully wrapped in a protective coating of irony and/or satire.
Jimmy Webb
I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Hanging on in Quiet Desperation is the English Way
Roger Waters
I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.
Pablo Casals
The older I get, the better I was.
Van Dyke Parks
My doctors, who are not cavalier with prescriptions, give me this medication because I have earned their trust. And yet, with mounting government and public pressure, my doctors’ hands are becoming increasingly tied. They apologetically explain to me why they are required to make the medication even harder for me to get, against their own medical judgment. If the day ever comes when they aren’t allowed to prescribe Percocet to me at all, it may well be the end of the minimal quality of life I fight so hard to achieve.
Michael Bihovsky
Since my symptoms began 13 years ago, I’ve tried every form of pain management I could access — NSAIDS, nonopioid analgesics, neurologic medications, acupuncture, laser therapy, physical therapy, prolotherapy, massage, and trigger-point injections. Most of these have been unhelpful; others provide temporary relief, often at great expense. At the end of the day, when my body is fully depleted of its resources and in the most pain, a single dose of Percocet is the only tool that silences the pain enough for me to fall asleep.I honestly don’t know what I’d do if Percocet became unavailable to me, and the very thought scares me. I’ve been taking it for five years. To avoid any chance of addiction, I only take it at night and have stayed on a consistently low dose.
Michael Bihovsky
We have a genuine and devastating epidemic of opiate abuse in this country, and it is of critical importance that this problem be addressed. But we must do so in a way that doesn’t cut off an effective (and often the only) treatment for the chronically ill, many of whom are able to function in this world at all only because of the small respite that responsible opiate use provides.
Michael Bihovsky
Bring the past, but only if you can build from it.
Dominico Scarlatti
You must have brought the bad weather with youThe sky's the color of leadAll you've left me is a featherOn an unmade bed
Tom Waits
Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily - the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging the mind, was of use in sustaining it. It was the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action, and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of contentment, the spirit at last persuaded that the still waters of perfection are reachable.
Paul Bowles
Verily, there is no dishonor in death at the hands of a far superior enemy.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
In these dangerous times, where it seems that the world is ripping apart at the seams, we all can learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day and [we] should reach out to each other and bond as a community, rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium.
Jonathan Larson
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Jaron Lanier
The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.
Jaron Lanier
An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy. I like the term "empathy" because it has spiritual overtones. A term like "sympathy" or "allegiance" might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to be slightly mystical, to suggest that we might not be able to fully understand what goes on between us and others, that we should leave open the possibility that the relationship can't be represented in a digital database.If someone falls within your circle of empathy, you wouldn't want to see him or her killed. Something that is clearly outside the circle is fair game. For instance, most people would place all other people within the circle, but most of us are willing to see bacteria killed when we brush our teeth, and certainly don't worry when we see an inanimate rock tossed aside to keep a trail clear.The tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle. The deepest controversies often involve whether something or someone should lie just inside or just outside the circle. For instance, the idea of slavery depends on the placement of the slave outside the circle, to make some people nonhuman. Widening the circle to include all people and end slavery has been one of the epic strands of the human story - and it isn't quite over yet.A great many other controversies fit well in the model. The fight over abortion asks whether a fetus or embryo should be in the circle or not, and the animal rights debate asks the same about animals.When you change the contents of your circle, you change your conception of yourself. The center of the circle shifts as its perimeter is changed. The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle. Empathy Inflation and Metaphysical AmbiguityAre there any legitimate reasons not to expand the circle as much as possible?There are. To expand the circle indefinitely can lead to oppression, because the rights of potential entities (as perceived by only some people) can conflict with the rights of indisputably real people. An obvious example of this is found in the abortion debate. If outlawing abortions did not involve commandeering control of the bodies of other people (pregnant women, in this case), then there wouldn't be much controversy. We would find an easy accommodation.Empathy inflation can also lead to the lesser, but still substantial, evils of incompetence, trivialization, dishonesty, and narcissism. You cannot live, for example, without killing bacteria. Wouldn't you be projecting your own fantasies on single-cell organisms that would be indifferent to them at best? Doesn't it really become about you instead of the cause at that point?
Jaron Lanier
Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the I’m a Fraud phase. You go through the I’ll Never Finish phase. And every once in a while you think, What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it’s received as such?
Lin-Manuel Miranda
enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.
Jaron Lanier
It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.
Jaron Lanier
that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.
Jaron Lanier
about: Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
Jaron Lanier
Revenge can only be found on the road to self-destruction.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
For me to read a good novel without enjoying a cup of coffee or a cup of tea or a nice glass of wine in the process would be like having water without the wet. It's simply impossible.
Cat Ellington
I'm apparently in love with a thirteen-year-old who makes lewd sex jokes in public, shamelessly plays footsy with me under the table the whole time I'm trying to enjoy my shrimp scampi, and is insatiably horny at all hours of the day.
Daryl Banner
Knowledge and the study of God's Word is voided by the folding of unwilling hands.
Joshua Roman
I know that our world is going through a very difficult time right now, but I will never lose my faith in humanity, and our incredible ability to overcome just about anything.
Yanni
If your romance is dying, perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
Igor Stravinsky
He gives me the impression of being a spoilt child.(on Liszt)
Clara Schumann
He was a six and a half foot scowl.(on Rachmaninov)
Igor Stravinsky
The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986
Anthony Burgess
Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Can’t say what impresses me most about my followers – their good looks, their incredible intellects, or their immunity to cheap flattery.
David Burge
Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.
Anthony Burgess
Deception and privileged secrets are common facets of politics.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I know a secret,and secrets breed paranoia.
Simon Holt
It's quite sad that so many children go through life unsure whether their parents love them or not.
Wayne Gerard Trotman