Music, Art and Madness Quotations and Proverbs

* some views expressed in these quotations not neccesarily endorsed by the author of this file.
* for entertainment only - history is not an exact science - dates and quotes not guaranteed for accuracy.

Added for June 2004:

Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once he grows up.

I'll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.
  • Miles Davis (1926-)
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
  • G. K.Chesterton (1874-1936) A: "Orthodoxy" 1908
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
  • Duke Ellington (? - 1974)
It takes courage to be creative. Just as soon as you have a new idea, you are a minority of one.
  • E. Paul Torrance
The only thing to do with a folk melody, once you have played it, is to play it louder.
  • Anon.
A folksinger is someone who sings through his nose by ear.
  • Anon.
If I had a hammer, I'd use it on Peter, Paul, and Mary.
  • Howard Rosenberg
Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.
  • Robert Fripp (1946 ? )
When you choose your fields of labor, go where nobody else is willing to go.
  • Mary Lyon (1797-1849)
I'm not Bob Dylan, you are.
  • Dylan, to an overzealous stalker/fan
To many he remains the greatest dreamer in music the world has ever known. His whole life was a dream; and his every effort was a votive offering to his temple of dreams that temple which he soulght to make beautiful.
  • Newman Flower, _George Frideric Handel_
I *must* write for what weighs on my heart, I *must* express. ... I live only in my music, and I have scarcely begun on thing when I start another. ... With whom need I fear to measure my strength?
  • Ludwig van Beethoven
Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
  • Edgard Varese
Music's golden tongue Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.
  • John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 3.
I was actually trying to create an atmosphere that was more redolent of the time when I became a musician, but not meant as a tribute, necessarily, to that time. I was just trying to figure out what made it all seem like, you know, dark chocolate, while everything now is like light beer.
  • Todd Rundgren (1948 - )
Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known.
  • Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.
  • Simoides of Ceos, from Plutarch
If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. . . . I get most joy in life out of music.
  • Albert Einstein (1879-1955) _Saturday Evening Post_ [October 26, 1929]
Middle age snuffs out more talent than ever wars or sudden deaths do.
  • Richard Hughes (1900 ?1976)
[Jazz] went from the classics to ragtime to Dixieland to swing to bebop to cool jazz. . . But it's always jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes you put on her, she's the same old broad.
  • Lionel Hampton
I have no desire to prove anything by dancing. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance. I just put my feet in the air and move them around.
  • Fred Astaire
There are many who maintain a thousand lies, and one is that eminent painters are strange, harsh, and unbearable in their manner, although they are really human and humane. And these fools, and not sensible persons, consider them fantastic and capricious and are loath to tolerate such characteristics in a painter.
  • Michelangelo, in conversations with Vittoria Colonna
The role of the artist is to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is handed down by the government or what is said in the media.
  • Howard Zinn, _Artists in times of War_
Highly gifted, yet meanly endowed; he had too much genius for so little independence of spirit. He rose above the depressing influences of low birth to sink under the caresses of the high-born.
  • Grattan, ibid

 

 

 

 

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