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 September 2004:

There is only one real happiness in life, and that is the happiness of creating.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
  • Antonin Artaud
The sound of the drum drives out thought; for that very reason it is the most military of instruments.
  • Joseph Joubert 1754-1824 Pensées (1842)
Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) _Over the Teacups_ 1891
Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
  • Henry van Dyke
Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.
  • Margaret Sarah Fuller
I think consciousness has a place in the cosmic game, the atoms-and-universe game, the big game. I can't imagine that it's mindless--there's too much organization, and the organization is too incredible.
  • Jerry Garcia (1942-1995) _The Wisdom of Jerry Garcia_ 1995
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
  • Elvis Presley
Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
I got fed up with all the sex and sleaze and backhanders of rock 'n' roll so I went into politics.
  • Tony Blair, on why he left pop group Ugly Rumours
I'm no actor, and I've got 64 pictures to prove it.
  • Victor Mature (1913-1999)
For some reason I didn't get into country and western until I was in my twenties, when Hank Williams and Patsy Cline reached down to me from heaven.
  • Bill Clinton, _My Life_, p. 55
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
  • Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
  • Garrison Keillor
27 days before Woodstock, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon; seven days before the festival, the Manson Family killed actress Sharon Tate and four others in Beverly Hills, California.
  • John Bassett McCleary (1943- ) _The Hippie Dictionary_ 2002
You're never too old to become younger.
  • Mae West (1892-?)
Anybody can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
  • jazz musician Charlie Mingus

 

 

 

 

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