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 January 2009:

We were billed as "Valerie and Nick" while in New York as performers, but as song-writers I suggested we sound a bit more professional and we changed it to "Ashford and Simpson". Then I went to Detroit [Motown].

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
  • George Santayana (1863 - 1952), Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
  • James Baldwin (1924 - 1987)
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.
  • John Lennon, Interview, BBC-TV, June 22, 1968
Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.
  • Martin Luther (1483 - 1546)
When one buys some of my artwork I hope it is because they will wish to learn from it and not because they think it will match their drapes!
  • Christian Cardell Corbet, 1997
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 - 1564)
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
  • Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
  • Albert Einstein ( _Sudden Death_ ch. 4 [1983] Rita Mae Brown )
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
  • Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887)
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
  • Leonard Bernstein, "The Unanswered Question" p. 140, 1976
We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have, Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task, The rest is the madness of art.
  • Henry James (1843 - 1916)
Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.
  • Percy Wynham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled
Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity...
  • Pau (Pablo) Casals (1876 - 1973)
There's a very fine line between a groove and a rut; a fine line between eccentrics and people who are just plain nuts.
  • Christine Lavin, lyrics to the song "Prisoners of their Hairdos"

 

 

 

 

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