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 2009:

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.
  • Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)
I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.
  • Jadelr and Cristina Cordova, Chasing Windmills, 07-24-06
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?
  • George Price
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
  • Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
  • Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964)
So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
  • Brenda Ueland
Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
  • John Russell (1607- 1694)
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
  • George Eliot (1819 - 1880), The Mill on the Floss, 1860
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 -)
Let each man exercise the art he knows.
  • Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC), Wasps, 422 B.C.
Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!
  • J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, 1997
If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.
  • Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992
In a burning house you must save a cat and a Rembrandt. Save the Rembrandt first and try to go back for the cat.
  • [obq]

 

 

 

 

quote