Quotes by Composers - Page 4

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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

I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

Brian Eno

Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it.

Irving Berlin

Dwell in the past, worry about the future and find misery in the present.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.

Leonard Bernstein

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.

Anthony Burgess

Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.

Anthony Burgess

I've developed into quite a swan. I'm one of those people that will probably look better and better as I get older - until I drop dead of beauty.

Rufus Wainwright

Deception and privileged secrets are common facets of politics.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

Europe had fallen back into the barbarity of the first ages. People from this part of world, so enlightened today, lived a few centuries ago in a state worse than ignorance. Some sort of learned jargon much more despicable than ignorance had usurped the name of knowledge and set up an almost invincible obstacle in the way of its return. A revolution was necessary to bring men back to common sense, and it finally came from a quarter where one would least expect it. It was the stupid Muslim, the eternal blight on learning, who brought about its rebirth among us.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Knowledge and the study of God's Word is voided by the folding of unwilling hands.

Joshua Roman

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

Stephen Sondheim

It is manlike to punish but godlike to forgive.

Peter von Winter

The reason [James Clerk] Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources to perform an act of discrimination. We imagine computation is free, but it never is. The very act of choosing which particle is cold or hot itself becomes an energy drain and a source of waste heat. The principle is also known as "no free lunch."We do our best to implement Maxwell's Demon whenever we manipulate reality with our technologies, but we can never do so perfectly; we certainly can't get ahead of the game, which is known as entropy. All the air conditioners in a city emit heat that makes the city hotter overall. While you can implement what seems to be a Maxwell's Demon if you don't look too far or too closely, in the big picture you always lose more than you gain.Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell's Demon, separating the state of "one" from the state of "zero" for a while, at a cost. A computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved.

Jaron Lanier

I've heard it said that people come into our lives for a reasonBringing something we must learnAnd we are led to those who help us most to grow If we let them and we help them in return.

Stephen Schwartz

And although we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid.

Richard M. Sherman

In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.

Robert Fripp

Only chance to make the world a success for humanity lies in technology, grand possibility technology provides to do more with less, and indiscriminately for everyone. Return to nature as nature pre-technologically was, attractive and possible as it still in some places is, can only work for some of us.

John Cage

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

Tom Waits

I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the

William Herschel

Any good music must be an innovation.

Les Baxter

Music is nectar for the soul.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

I shall seize fate by the throat.

Ludwig van Beethoven

You may be thinking that your company has a human resources person who will keep you out of trouble. This is a dangerous misconception. Whether your company has a massive Human Resources Department with hundreds of representatives or a small office with just a single representative, these HR reps are not your advocates. They work for the company, not for you.

Johanna Harris

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Anthony Burgess

Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out while Romantic grows from outside in.

Ned Rorem

The happiest is he who suffers the least pain the most miserable he who enjoys the least pleasure.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?

Frank Zappa

A dreamer-you know-it's a mind that looks over the edges of things.

Mary O'Hara

I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in.

Stephen Sondheim

Be proactive. Passivity is a poison. Avoid it like the plague. Actively participate in life. You are not a bystander standing on the sidelines of life. Get in the game and go for the goal. Choose what you will do with your life. Choose what you will do with your time. What will you do? What will you watch, read, accomplish, and become? Accomplishment is a result of action. Act the part. Don’t pretend or put on a façade. Don’t wait. Don’t pause. Don’t hesitate. Go. Be. Do. Accomplish. Get it done. ACT. ACT NOW!

Jerald Simon

Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.

Frédéric Chopin

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 sure my music has a taste of codfish in it.

Edvard Grieg

Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude.

Anthony Burgess

And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.

Anthony Burgess

That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and sleeping first in one room, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt.

Paul Bowles

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

You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.

Paul Bowles

Don’t tell me you’re not good at something. People will always be better and worse than you at everything you do. Tell me whether or not you are making progress. If you are progressing, are you measuring your progress? If you are not progressing, why not? Get to know your strengths and your weaknesses. Develop your own personal progress plan and determine how you could improve and progress from where you are. You most likely don’t know how far you have come and how much you truly have accomplished. Improve and progress!

Jerald Simon

Given the chance, i'll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season's over.

Brian Eno

Sooner or later you've heard all your best friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.

Ned Rorem

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

New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.

Tom Waits

Our life contains a thousand springs,And dies if one be gone.Strange that a harp of thousand stringsShould keep in tune so long.

William Billings

Realized dreams often turn into nightmares.

Lera Auerbach

There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.

Anthony Burgess

My wife's the reason anything gets done, she nudges me towards promise by degrees. She is a perfect symphony of one our son is her most beautiful reprise. We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they're finished songs and start to play. When senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised--not one day. This show is proof that history remembers. We live in times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall and light from dying embers--remembrances that hope and love last longer. And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. I sing Vanessa's symphony. Eliza tells her story. Now, fill the world with music, love, and pride.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...

Anthony Burgess

If a literary man puts together two words about music one of them will be wrong.

Aaron Copland

A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.

Mikhail Glinka

Loneliness Ends With Love

Al Lerner

Ultimately, musicians of the world must come realise the potential of their calling.Like the shamans, we may serve as healers, metaphysicians, inciters, exciters,spiritual guides and sources of inspiration. If the musician is illuminated from within,he becomes a lamp that lights other lamps. Then he is serving planet and its people,healing what ails us. Such music is truly important. It is said that “only one who obeys can truly command.” When the artist is immersed in a services,giving himself up over and over again, another paradox occurs:He is being seen by all others as a master.

Kenny Werner

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another…and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.”—

Leonard Bernstein

The decent man and the lover holds back even when he could obtain what he wishes. To win this silent consent is to make use of all the violence permitted in love. To read it in the eyes, to see it in the ways in spite of the mouth's denial, that is the art of he who knows how to love. If he then completes his happiness, he is not brutal, he is decent. He does not insult chasteness; he respects it; he serves it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A true master will not deceive an able disciple. You are hampered by the limits you set and no limit can be set on skill.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

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