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 May 2006:

The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable

There is repetition everywhere, and nothing is found only once in the world.
  • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
He's very fussy about his drums, you know. They loom large in his legend.
  • George Harrison speaking about Ringo Starr
I'm a dweller on the threshold -- And I'm waiting at the door
And I'm standing in the darkness -- I don't want to wait no more
  • Van Morrison _Dweller on the Threshold_ 1982
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
  • Aristotle
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
  • Theodore Dreiser
Art is a kind of illness.
  • Giacomo Puccini
The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
  • Salvador Dali
Lou Reed said of the Velvet Underground's debut album: it only sold about four hundred copies, but everybody who bought it started a band.
  • Brian Eno
Reason ne'er was hand-and-glove - With rhyme, but always leant less to improving
The sound than sense - besides all these pretences
To Love, there are those things which Words name Senses.
  • Byron, DON JUAN, Canto IX, 585-592.
I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.
  • John Cleese
If people knew how hard I have had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all.
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti
I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper.
  • Gary Cooper (1901-1961), on his decision to not take the Rhett Butler role in _Gone With the Wind_
When we collaborate, I have to keep an eye on him. . . . If Auden had his way, he would turn every play into a cross between grand opera and high mass.
  • Christopher Isherwood, 1937, quoted in ibid
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
  • Henry David Thoreau
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
  • Robertson Davies, _Samuel Marchbanks' Almanac_
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
  • Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
  • Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) _Three Men in a Boat_ ch. 15, 1889.
My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.
  • Abraham Lincoln
I am still half living in the world of my Fourth [Symphony].-This one is quite fundamentally different from my other symphonies. But that must be; I could never repeat a state of mind-and as life drives on, so too I follow new tracks in every work. That is why at first it is always so hard for me to get down to work. All the skill that experience has taught one is of no avail. One has to begin to learn all over again for the new thing one sets out to make. So one remains everlastingly a beginner! Once this used to make me anxious and fill me with doubts about myself. But since I have understood how it is, it is my guarantee of the authenticity and permanence of my works.
  • Gustav Mahler, letter to Nanna Spiegler, Aug. 18, 1900

 

 

 

 

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