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 March 2009:

Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.
  • Alice Neel (1900-1984)
Much Madness is divinest Sense -- to a discerning Eye -- much Sense -- the starkest Madness.
  • Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)
I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.
  • George Balanchine (1904 - 1983)
When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time.
  • Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly (1925 - ?)
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
  • Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)
To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
  • Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990)
A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.
  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 - 1938)
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
  • George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.
  • Plato (428 BC-348 BC)
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
  • Eckhart Tolle (1945 -)
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
  • Marcel Marceau (1923 - 2007)
O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad.
  • William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
I'm painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I'm trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.
  • Euan Uglow (1932 - 2000)

 

 

 

 

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