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Quotation of the day
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
Daily Quote:
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests" (Vidal, Gore - Language)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Music

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.
'Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean, to be entreated, either to begin or end.
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.
A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.
A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!
Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.
Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.
Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.
Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.
Country music is three chords and the truth.
Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.
Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.
Good music is very close to primitive language.
Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.
I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.
I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.
I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.
I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.
I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.
I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.
I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.
I was a veteran before I was a teenager.
I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.
I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.
I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.
I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
If music be the food of love; play on.
If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.
If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?
It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.
It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.
It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.
It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.
Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.
Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.
Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.
Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.
Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.
Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.
Mozart is sweet sunshine.
Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.
Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.