Instruments Quotes - Page 30

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

Bill Gates

Fall, Government, People

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I think…to give. In the best way I can, through song and through dance and through music. I mean, I am committed to my art. I believe that all art has as its ultimate goal the union between the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. I believe that to be the reason for the very existence of art. And I feel I was chosen as an instrument to just give music and love and harmony to the world. To children of all ages, and adults and teenagers.... I love people of all races from my heart, with true affection.

Michael Jackson

Spiritual, Song, Art

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Our public credit is good, but the abundance of paper has produced a spirit of gambling in the funds, which has laid up our ships at the wharves as too slow instruments of profit, and has even disarmed the hand of the tailor of his needle and thimble. They say the evil will cure itself. I wish it may; but I have rarely seen a gamester cured, even by the disasters of his vocation.

Thomas Jefferson

Gambling, Hands, Evil

Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”, p.126

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Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

Marcel Proust

Book, Aids, Found

Marcel Proust (1932). “Remembrance of Things Past”, New York : Random House

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We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.

C. S. Lewis

Wine, Play, Poison

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The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.

Umberto Eco

Thrown

Umberto Eco (2014). “The Name of the Rose”, p.528, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.

Ansel Adams

Photography, Attitude, Empathy

Ansel Adams, Mary Street Alinder (2017). “Ansel Adams: An Autobiography”, p.72, Hachette UK

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The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Beautiful, Pain, Men

Percy Bysshe Shelley (2006). “A Defence of Poetry: an Essay: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.15, ReadHowYouWant.com

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Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands and all you can do is scratch it.

Thomas Beecham

Giving, Musical, Scratches

To a cellist; attributed, no source found

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In my opinion, the trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments, which I have named the 'epic' one. It possesses nobility and grandeur to the highest degree; it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst. Directed by the will of the master, the trombones can chant like a choir of priests, threaten, utter gloomy sighs, a mournful lament, or a bright hymn of glory; they can break forth into awe-inspiring cries and awaken the dead or doom the living with their fearful voices.

Hector Berlioz

Music, Religious, Powerful

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You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments
producing a confused agreeable mass
of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

Arnold Bennett

Confused, Thinking, Sound

Arnold Bennett (2012). “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: with The Human Machine”, p.42, Courier Corporation

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Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency--the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.

Stephen Jay Gould

Powerful, Rap, Exercise

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One of the things I appreciate more was how important struggle was as the instrument that helped to keep us knit together.

Ossie Davis

Struggle, Appreciate, Important

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Nobody knows whether our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere, but if we can evolve an instrument so delicate to be manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life such an instrument ought to record something.

Thomas A. Edison

Personality, Records, Next

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With a different form of wireless instrument devised by me some years ago it was found practicable to locate a body of metallic ore below the ground, and it seems that a submarine could be similarly detected.

Nikola Tesla

Years, Different, Submarines

Nikola Tesla (2013). “The Nikola Tesla Treasury”, p.634, Simon and Schuster

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Sport, properly directed, develops character, makes a man courageous, a generous loser, and a gracious victor; it refines the senses, gives intellectual penetration, and steels the will to endurance. It is not merely a physical development then. Sport, rightly understood, is an occupation of the whole man, and while perfecting the body as an instrument of the mind, it also makes the mind itself a more refined instrument for the search and communication of truth and helps man to achieve that end to which all others must be subservient, the service and praise of his Creator.

Pope Pius XII

Sports, Communication, Character

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This is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in life—investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute.

Stephen Covey

Powerful, Investment, Deals

Stephen R. Covey (2016). “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change Interactive Edition”, p.364, Mango Media Inc.

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Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas.

George Gershwin

Ideas, Use, Strange

1930 'The Composer in the Machine Age'.

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.. the guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It's everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It's everything, but it's elusive

Les Paul

Music, Guitar, Wonderful

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In oddball places, the electric guitar has been taken as an almost alien object - this weird, six-stringed instrument that fell down to earth and was then played loud but with traditional grace and intelligence

Ry Cooder

Music, Taken, Guitar

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The music you make is shaped by what you play it on ... if you feel that you're not getting enough out of a song, change the instrument - go from an acoustic to an electric or vice versa, or try an open tuning ... do something to shake it up.

Mark Knopfler

Music, Song, Play

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... by then I was getting a little work, doing some playing and getting paid for it, not very much, but enough for me to feel justified in buying a real instrument. I bought a Gretsch with a De-Armond pickup on it and a second-hand Gibson amplifier; it looked like the one Charlie Christian used. I guess it was the same, although there were several models coming out at that time - this would be in I939.

Tal Farlow

Music, Christian, Real

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Michael Bloomfield was the antithesis of a collector ... he didn't care how old a guitar was; all he wanted was something that sounded good when played it ... and he cared nothing about the collectibility of an instrument ... his philosophy was "A good player can make any guitar sound good" ... to Michael, a guitar was just a tool.

Nick Gravenites

Music, Philosophy, Player

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There is still a very strong subculture of people who want to do great things on an instrument, and who are stimulated by hearing people who can. That's reassuring. But it's gonna take a person - and I don't know who this is - to come along and reinvent the guitar as a virtuosic instrument in a completely different realm than any of us have done, or anybody else in the past. That's the clincher. Maybe that will happen and maybe it won't.

Steve Vai

Music, Strong, Past

"From the Archive: Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen Discuss the 2003 G3 Tour". Interview with Alan di Perna, www.guitarworld.com. January 14, 2012.

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... you watch Jimi Hendrix literally reinvent the instrument. He was playing from somewhere else. He was really a kind of hybrid, and I can't even begin to imagine where he came from

Steve Vai

Music, Somewhere Else, Watches

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