Music Quotes - Page 30

• An animal can learn to fight, but to sing beautiful things and make people believe them.

  Dalton Trumbo

  Beautiful, Believe, Fighting

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• When you are listening to music it is better to cover your eyes than your ears.

  Jose Bergamin

  Eye, Over You, Listening

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• Music and Wine are one.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wine, Musician

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1979). “Emerson's Literary Criticism”, p.71, U of Nebraska Press

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• How pleasant it is to be ignorant! Not to know exactly who Mozart was, to ignore his origin, his influence, the details of his technique! To just let him lead one by the hand.

  Maria Luisa Bombal

  Hands, Ignorant, Technique

  Arturo Torres-Rioseco, Félix Pita Rodríguez, Lino Novás Calvo, Horacio Quiroga, Francisco Ayala (1967). “Short stories of Latin America”

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• My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Travel, Men, Smell

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• Music sets up ladders,
  it makes us invisible,
  it sets us apart,
  it lets us escape;
  but from the visible
  there is no escape.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Ladders, Invisible, Musician

  Hilda Doolittle (1998). “Trilogy”, New Directions Publishing

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• Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
  The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
  For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
  Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.

  John Ashbery

  Horse, Past, Wind

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• Down the road someone is practicing scales,
  The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails

  Louis MacNeice

  Sound, Tails, Littles

  Louis Macneice, “Sunday Morning”

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• I was just glad to get the Grammy. I didn't know what the thing was. It's the honor what I loved.

  Elizabeth Cotten

  Art, Honor, Performing

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• A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Art, Laughing, Tears

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• The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. : the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence.

  Philippe Aries

  Strength, Hero, Typical

  Philippe Ariès (1962). “Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life”, Vintage

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• In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Color, Snakes, Elephants

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.53, Harvard University Press

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• Art is beauty, and every exposition of art, whether it be music, painting, or the drama, should be subservient to that one great end. As long as nature is a means to the attainment of beauty, so-called realism is necessary and permissable [sic], but it must be realism enhanced by idealism and uplifted by the spirit of an inner life or purpose.

  Julia Marlowe

  Beauty, Art, Drama

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• We use important words too frequently and they lose value; for instance, charm and great. An actor or musician often is proclaimedgreat when we really mean he is outstanding.

  Eleanor Robson Belmont

  Art, Mean, Often Is

  Eleanor Robson Belmont (1957). “The Fabric of Memory”

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• Light threatens, is active, is gone,
  so it is with a song.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Song, Light, Gone

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.401, New Directions Publishing

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• The bar... is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable-and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a client that doesn't like to talk.

  Luis Bunuel

  Exercise, Dark, Alcohol

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• At that elusive moment when we transcend our ordinary performance and feel in harmony with something else-whether it's a glorious sunset, inspiring music or another human being-our studies have shown that what we are really coming in sync with is ourselves. Not only do we feel more relaxed and at peace, but this entrained state increases our ability to perform well and offers numerous health benefits.

  Doc Childre

  Sunset, Ordinary, Benefits

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• Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round.

  Jose Bergamin

  Opposites, Doe, Way

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• People of talent resemble a musical instrument more closely than they do a musician. Without outside help, they produce not a single sound, but given even the slightest touch, and a magnificent tune emanates from them.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Inspirational, People, Sound

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• The old men of the village of Mahotière say that the Mistress of the Water is a mulatto woman. At midnight she comes out of the spring and sings while combing her dripping long hair, which makes a sound sweeter than a violin. It is a song of perdition for whomever hears it. There is no sign of the Cross, no "Our Father" to save him. Her curse takes him like a fish in a net and the Mistress of the Water awaits him on the edge of the spring and smiles upon him and tells him to follow her to the depths, from which he will never return.

  Jacques Roumain

  Song, Father, Spring

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• When I listen to the engine of my car, I might say it sounds fine, but it would not occur to me to say "What lovely music!

  Jose Bergamin

  Car, Lovely, Sound

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• Two touch the string,
  The harp is dumb.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Two, Solitude, Dumb

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Poems”, p.152, The Floating Press

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• And at dawn, the drums still beat on the sleepless plain like an unstoppable heart.

  Jacques Roumain

  Heart, Dawn, Unstoppable

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• So I cradle this average violin that knows
  Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
  The possibility of free declamation anchored
  To a dull refrain.

  John Ashbery

  Average, Dull, Violin

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”, Penguin Group USA

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• The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.

  H. L. Mencken

  Feelings, Mirth, Rage

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.524, Vintage

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