Quotes by Composers - Page 9

Yes yes yes, there it was. Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.
Anthony Burgess
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
Anthony Burgess
Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.
John Cage
I do not need drugs to be a genius, do not take a genius to be human, but I need your smile to be happy.
Charlie Chaplin
We are all part of a universal game. Returning to our essence while living in the world is the object of the game. The earth is the game board, and we are the pieces on the board. We move around and around until we remember who we really are, and then we can be taken off the board. At that point, we are no longer the game-piece, but the player; we've won the game.
Kenny Werner
Optimists are usually inexperienced.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
By reflecting a little on this subject I am almost convinced that those numberless small Circuses we see on the moon are the works of the Lunarians and may be called their Towns.
William Herschel
The pessimist may call the optimist a fool; but who is more foolish, the happy individual who expects more happiness or the one who fills his life with bitterness and has only more despair to look forward to?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I haven't been to a movie for three months of Sundays. I gather from what Carolyn reports that Hollywood now produces false entertainment: unmitigated violence on the screen; snickering, laughter in the audience.
John Cage
On his way offstage, the president shook hands with Lin and said, "I'm proud of you, man." (In a gesture of self-restraint, Lin had stuck to the performance calendar they had announced before learning that President Obama was coming, the one that said Javier Muñoz would play Hamilton that afternoon.)
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Moments come & go, but special moments last a lifetime.Make them count!
Mark Hewer
Moments come & moments go, but can last a lifetime in your heart. Make them count!
Mark Hewer
As sure as the driven rain, the sun will shine again!
Mark Hewer
Be grateful for each moment, for we know not which will be our last.
Mark Hewer
Moments come & go, but special moments last a lifetime. Make them count!
Mark Hewer
You are perfectly cast in your life. I can't imagine anyone but you in the role. Go play.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
What's all this about sin, eh?''That,' I said, very sick. 'Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.' And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.'Music,' said Dr. Brodsky, like musing. 'So you're keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It's a useful emotional heightener, that's all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, eh, Branom?''It can't be helped,' said Dr. Branom. 'Each man kills the thing he loves...
Anthony Burgess
Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.
Anthony Burgess
A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The aim of the taper is to minimise accumulated fatigue and fill up the fuel stores to arrive at the start line fresh.
Dan Golding
Cries for justice are often the bitter laments of the vengeful.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Laws are always useful to those who possess and vexatious to those who have nothing.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Of what value is your life, unless you are willing to sacrifice it for those you love?
Wayne Gerard Trotman
A gift involves sacrifice. If you give away something that you no longer value or want, it cannot be a gift. It is simply a discarded item.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage
It is odd that the Bible says, ‘God created man,’ whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, ‘The body is mortal, the soul is immortal,’ whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the body) is transitory.
Béla Bartók
In 1857, Bizet departed for Rome and spent three years there. He studied the landscape, the culture, Italian literature and art. Musically he studied the scores of the great masters. At the end of the first year he was asked to submit a religious work as his required composition. As a self-described atheist, Bizet felt uneasy and hypocritical writing a religious piece. Instead, he submitted a comic opera. Publicly, the committee accepted, acknowledging his musical talent. Privately, the committee conveyed their displeasure. Thus, early in his career, Bizet displayed an independent spirit that would be reflected in innovative ideas in his opera compos
Georges Bizet
(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...
Pierre Boulez
I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.
Brian Eno
Politicians and others are stuck in a horrible world where being emotional in any way counts as being unbalanced, and unable to think clearly. For me, emotions are thought.
Hofesh Shechter
It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
Anthony Burgess
Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered." (Bk2:8)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived..." (Bk2:3)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.
Paul Bowles
Government in its infancy had no regular and permanent form. For want of a sufficient fund of philosophy and experience, men could see no further than the present inconveniences, and never thought of providing remedies for future ones, but in proportion as they arose.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Leonard Bernstein
An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the State, very severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not hit back also? But the new view is to say no. The new view is that we turn the bad into the good. All of which seems to me grossly unjust.
Anthony Burgess
Happy am I, for every time I meditate on governments, I always find new reasons in my inquiries for loving my own country.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
Anthony Burgess
I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, that two become a lawfirm, and that three or more become a congress. -John Adams
Sherman Edwards
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
Jaron Lanier
Always remember your days are blessed. You may know how to profit from them or you may not, but they are blessed.
Nadia Boulanger
Lovers and warriors are not bound by the rules of fair play.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, "This guy comes with us," I think it wasn't just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else.
Philip Glass
We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.
John Powell
I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence. Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken.
Robert Fripp
Music is the silence between the notes.
Claude Debussy
I went to a concert upstairs in Town Hall. The composer whose works were being performed had provided program notes. One of these notes was to the effect that there is too much pain in the world. After the concert I was walking along with the composer and he was telling me how the performances had not been quite up to snuff. So I said, "Well, I enjoyed the music, but I didn't agree with that program note about there being too much pain in the world." He said, "What? Don't you think there's enough?" I said, "I think there's just the right amount.
John Cage
You love your child for who the child is, not as an extension of your identity or as an example of your good parenting or even as a companion.
Robert Fritz
The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you...and then, the worse things get.
Frank Zappa
I am not worried about pleasing clever minds or fashionable people. In every period there will be men fated to be governed by the opinions of their century, their country, and their society. For that very reason, a freethinker or philosopher today would have been nothing but a fanatic at the time of the League.* One must not write for such readers, if one wishes to live beyond one’s own age.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Adopting the language of a pretense only serves to ease participation in it.
Bartok
Nothing is more intolerable than to have admit to yourself your own errors.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to be satisfied with that, and without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to set between them and us that glorious distinction which people made long ago between two great peoples: one knew how to speak well; the other how to act well.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.
Anthony Burgess