Ears Quotes - Page 27

• I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

  Koren Zailckas

  Thinking, Numbers, Stories

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• I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I'd shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can't pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that's how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

  B. B. King

  Guitar, Hands, Play

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• The music of Gavin Bryars falls under no category. It is mongrel, full of sensuality and wit and is deeply moving. He is one of the few composers who can put slapstick and primal emotion alongside each other. He allows you to witness new wonders in the sounds around you by approaching them from a completely new angle. With a third ear maybe.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Moving, Fall, Sound

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• One must find rhythms others' ears don't hear.

  David Anthony Durham

  Rhythm

  David Anthony Durham (2010). “Acacia”, p.451, Random House

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• There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech.... A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Dog, Rain

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• And to think of this great country in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian legends as the canons of modern culture. Our scientific men are paying for their failure to speak out earlier. There is no use now talking evolution to these people. Their ears are stuffed with Genesis.

  Luther Burbank

  Country, Men, Thinking

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• I hate superheroes. I always hated superheroes. From the time I was a little kid, I could believe in a 50-foot gorilla trashing New York City before I could believe a guy would put on long tights and bat ears and go and fight crime. Like, the fantasy never made sense to me, on a basic level.

  Stephen R. Bissette

  New York, Hate, Believe

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2009.

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• I told [my daughter Amy] at an early age that she had a good ear. But I didn't influence her music much. She's pretty much developed her style on her own, and she's a talented songwriter.

  Mose Allison

  Daughter, Style, Age

  Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. April 2, 2010.

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• Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significance of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Wise, Dream, Believe

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• Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea.

  John Henry Newman

  Beautiful, Eye, Men

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• One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Running, Distance, Communication

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.91, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Some of the biggest bores I've ever known are men who have been highly successful in business, particularly self-made heads of big companies. Before the first olive has settled into the first martini, they pour the stories of their lives into the nearest and sometimes the remotest ears capturable.... These men have indeed paid the price of success. To rise to the top of a big company often takes a totality of effort, concentration and dedication. Others, too, have to pay part of the price. Wife and children are out of mind even when in sight.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Children, Successful, Men

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• I have mummy truths to tell
  Whereat the living mock,
  Though not for sober ear,
  For maybe all that hear
  Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

  William Butler Yeats

  Truth, Afterlife, Laughing

  William Butler Yeats (1962). “Poems of William Butler Yeats”, p.37, Hayes Barton Press

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• For what but eye and ear silence the mind
  With the minute particulars of mankind?

  William Butler Yeats

  Eye, Silence, Mind

  William Butler Yeats (1962). “Poems of William Butler Yeats”, p.233, Hayes Barton Press

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• Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

  William James

  Truth, Real, Thinking

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.78, 谷月社

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• Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.

  Joseph Addison

  Music, Art, Plato

  Joseph Addison (1867). “The Works of Joseph Addison: Including the Whole Contents of Bp. Hurd's Edition, with Letters and Other Pieces Not Found in Ay Previous Collection; and Macaulay's Essay on His Life and Works”, p.65

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• When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
  All Nature was degraded;
  The King dropped a tear in the Queen's ear,
  And all his pictures faded.

  William Blake

  Kings, Queens, Artist

  Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds p. cix 'When Sir Joshua Reynolds died' (c.1808)

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• I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! … I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun's disk.

  Alexander Graham Bell

  Laughter, Clouds, Laughing

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• Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

  James Joyce

  Night, Names, Maleficent

  James Joyce (2014). “The Dead and Other Stories: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition”, p.17, Broadview Press

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• If the hero is not a person, the emblem
  Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
  To stand taller than a person stands, has
  A wider brow, large and less human
  Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
  Of a primitive.

  Wallace Stevens

  Hero, Eye, Men

  Wallace Stevens (1997). “Collected Poetry and Prose”

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• I would like to think that no one would die anymore
  if we all believed in daisies
  but the worms know better, don't they?
  They slide into the ear of a corpse
  and listen to his great sigh.

  Anne Sexton

  Thinking, Slides, Daisies

  Anne Sexton (1974). “The death notebooks”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• Soon the purple dark must bruise
  Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
  And the little Cupid lose
  Eyes and ears and chin and nose

  Donald Justice

  Heart, Eye, Dark

  Donald Justice (2009). “Collected Poems”, p.40, Knopf

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• From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there--in the liveliness of our innate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Children, Eye, Listening Ear

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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• ... the hey-day of a woman's life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Sympathy, Children, Humanity

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2016). “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: As Revealed in Her Letters & Diary (Abridged)”, p.233, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• As, in Sense, that which is really within us, is (as I have said before) only Motion, caused by the action of external objects, but in appearance; to the Sight, Light and Color; to the Ear, Sound; to the Nostril, Odor, &c.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Light, Sight, Color

  Thomas Hobbes (1898). “The Ethics of Hobbes: As Contained in Selections from His Works”

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