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 2007:

These days, what isn't worth saying is sung.

I was never worried that synthesizers would replace musicians. First of all, you have to be a musician in order to make music with a synthesizer.
  • Robert Moog (1934 - 2005)
 The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.
  • Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895)
 Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.
  • Robert Fripp, guitarist (King Crimson, etc.)
 Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.
  • Salvadore Dali (1904 - 1989)
 The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
  • Ursula K. LeGuin, _The Tombs of Atuan_ (1971)
 If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking 'till you do succeed!
  • The Three Stooges "Curly" (Jerome Lester Horwitz 1903-1952) from "Movie Maniacs" (1936)
 Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you.
  • Orson Scott Card, _Xenocide_ (1991)
 I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
 What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie? [...] Rush in and die, dogs - I was a man before I was a king.
  • Robert E. Howard (1906 - 1936)
Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can't teach old fleas new dogs.
  • Federico Fellini, Atlantic Monthly, December 1965
 There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it.
  • H. L. Mencken
 To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands.
  • Madame Swetchine (1782 - 1857)
 This is the task that Wagner set himself in his art - to offer redemption without doctrine, and religious emotion without religious belief. It is the reason why he is both worshipped and hated as an artist.
  • Roger Scruton, A Political philosophy, p.123
 'If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.' But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
  • Kurt Vonnegut, in a speech in September 2003 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison
 Writers should be read-but neither seen nor heard.
  • Daphne duMaurier (1907 - 1989)
 Imagine listening to Beethoven with the prepossession that C is a good note and F a bad one; yet this is exactly the standpoint from which all uninitiates contemplate the universe. Obviously, they miss the music.
  • Aleister Crowley, Autohagiography
 I wish I had a tray table in my bedroom and I wish I smoked, just so I could extinguish my smoking materials.
  • Augusten Burroughs, _Running With Scissors_
 It said: "I am the invisible nonentity. I have affinities and am subtle. I am electric, magnetic, and spiritualistic. I am the great ethereal sigh-heaver. I kill dogs. Mortal, wilt thou choose me?"
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) "Selecting a Ghost"

 

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