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 December 2006:

On the stage, you have to find truth, even if you have to lose the audience.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
  • George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I don't do drugs. I am drugs.
  • Salvador Dali, in response to "Do you use drugs?"
We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongues, at our peril, risk and hazard.
  • Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire, Liberty of the Press in Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, 'Thus far and no farther.'
  • Ludwig van Beethoven
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.
  • John Newton (1725-1807) _Olney Hymns_ [1779]
I'm never making dispassionate judgments. I don't even believe in mathematics, except emotionally. Einstein admits he got hunches -- and then organized them.
  • David Smith, sculptor, (1906-1965)
My pictures are painted to be listened to.
  • Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979)_The Observer_ [March 25, 1979]
Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once he grows up.
  • Pablo Ruiz y Picasso
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
  • Leonardo da Vinci
The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing
  • James Brown
An artist is not paid for his labor, but for his vision.
  • James McNeill Whistler
My philosophy of dance? I make it up, and you watch it. End of philosophy.
  • Mark Morris, quoted in Joan Acocella, Mark Morris
We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
  • May Sarton (1912-1995)
Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.
  • Roy Adzak, quoted in "Contemporary Artists", 1977.
Consciousness is a disease.
  • Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) _The Tragic Sense Of Life_ [1913], Chapter 1

 

 

 

 

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