Sunday, June 29, 2008

Jules-Henri Poincaré


1. ”Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence.... The two propositions: "The earth turns round" and "it is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round" have the same meaning; there is nothing more in the one than in the other.”
2. "A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of the same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the case that the natural laws had nolonger any secret for us, we could still know the situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by the laws. But is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the finalphenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible..."
3. " ...by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous."
4. "Facts do not speak."
5. "Ideas rose in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination."
6. “If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.”
7. "Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority. To invent is to discern, to choose."
8. “It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.”
9. ”Mathematicians are born, not made.”
10. “Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stone, but a collection of facts is no more of a science than a heap of stones is a house.”
11. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.”
12. ”Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.”
13. “To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”
14. "What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration? It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details."

Complications

“Every good story needs a complication. A story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms. This point of departure is the story's complicaton.”

Monica Wood

Wow!

“If you're lying on a beach with
80 billion grains of sand beneath you,
700 thousand ocean waves before you,
and you're still not at all impressed,
I want you to think about this:
The light you see reflecting from the stars is over one million years old.
WOW.
But, then, just before you start to feel like a mere blip
in the gigantic scheme of things, please remember this:
Yes, you are small, but you're also irrplaceable
and invaluable
and miraculous.
These stars don't have anything on you.”

Le Ann Womack

Kernel of eternity

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being-- the reward he seeks-- the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

Tom Wolfe

A spark of madness

“You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.”

Robin Williams

The mind

“The mind is an erogenous zone.”

Raquel Welch

Hunger

“Yet that hunger to begin anew was tempered by a matching emotion which might almost have been called regret. An awareness that somehow they had become part of a tale which would be told and retold, and, undoubtedly, grow still greater in the tellings… and that all tales end.”

David Weber

Tomorrow´s past

"The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute its memories, glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past."

Mary Webb

Novels

“Novels are like marriages. You have to get into the mood to write them - not because of what writing them is going to be like, but because it's so sad to end them. When I finished my first book, I really felt like I'd fallen in love with my main character and that she'd died. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish, then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagin ation, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff. Characters in stories are different. They come alive in the corners of your eyes. You don't have to live with them.”

David Foster Wallace

Where are the stories?

“Where are the stories that challenge the notion that perfect happiness can be found in a "perfect" body? Where are the anecdotes about learning to love parts of ourselves not because of how they look or how they measure up to Cindy Crawford, but because of how they feel to us, or how they tell a unique part of our personal history.”

Rebecca Walker

A fleeting show

This world is all a fleeting show,
For man's illusion given;
The smiles of joy, the tears of woe,
Deceitful shine, deceitful flow,
There's nothing true but Heaven.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
_This World Is All A Fleeting Show_

Won or lost?

Does the imagination dwell the most,
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
_The Tower_ [1928], Part II, Line 13

Friday, June 27, 2008

When Insults Had Class

When Insults Had Class
(From jokester.net)

When Insults Had Class (no 4-letter words!!) These glorious insults are from an era when cleverness with words was still valued, before a great portion of the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words, not to mention waving middle fingers.

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison," and he said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

Photobucket

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
Winston Churchill

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. "Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." Moses Hadas

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
Abraham Lincoln

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend.... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." Jack E. Leonard

"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt." - Robert Redford

"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." - Thomas Brackett Reed

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

(Source: jokester.net)

Socrates


1. “All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.”
2. "A multitude of books distracts the mind."
3. “And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.”
4. "An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all"
5. “An unexamined life is not worth living.”
6. “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.”
7. "A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true."
8. “Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.”
9. “Be as you wish to seem.”
10. “Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.”
11. “Be of good hope in the face of death. Believe in this one truth for certain, that no evil can befall a good man either in life or death, and that his fate is not a matter of indifference to the gods.”
12. “Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.”
13. “Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.”
14. “By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.”
15. “Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.”
16. "Death may be the greatest of all human blessings."
17. “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.”
18. "Enjoy yourself -- it's later than you think."
19. “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”
20. “Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.”
21. “For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man. But men fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils.”
22. “From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.”
23. ”Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.”
24. "Happiness is unrepentant pleasure."
25. “Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.”
26. "He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."
27. “How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two, but they are joined by a single head. And I cannot help thinking that if Aesop had remembered them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and how, when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows: as I know by my own experience now, when after the pain in my leg which was caused by the chain pleasure appears to succeed.”
28. “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.”
29. “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
30. “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.”
31. "I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean."
32. “I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.”
33. “If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own.”
34. "If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won't be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ionizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded."
35. “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.”
36. "I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think."
37. "In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent."
38. "I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good."
39. "I pray Thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within."
40. “I thought to myself, 'I am wiser than this man: neither of us knows anything that is really worthwhile, but he thinks he has knowledge when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think that I have. I seem, at any rate, to be a little wiser than he is on this point: I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
41. "I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether."
42. “I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.”
43. “Let him that would move the world first move himself.”
44. "Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it."
45. “Man's life is like a drop of dew on a leaf.”
46. "Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak."
47. "No evil can befall a good man either in life or death."
48. "Nothing is to be preferred before justice."
49. “O beloved Pan, and all ye other gods of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man.”
50. “Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, "How many things I have no need of!"
51. ”Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.”
52. "One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing."
53. “Only the extremely ignorant or the extremely intelligent can resist change.”
54. “Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.”
55. “Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of - for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.”
56. "Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune."
57. “Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.”
58. “Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.”
59. “See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.”
60. "Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me."
61. “The ancient oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.”
62. “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”
63. "The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow."
64. “The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.”
65. "The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows."
66. "The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance."
67. "The perfect human being is all human beings put together, it is a collective, it is all of us together that make perfection."
68. “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
69. “The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be; all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.”
70. “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
71. "The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear."
72. “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.”
73. "They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed."
74. "Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults."
75. “To do is to be.”
76. “To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?”
77. "To find yourself, think for yourself."
78. ”Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.”
79. “To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?”
80. “To find yourself, think for yourself.”
81. “True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.”
82. "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us."
83. ”Virtue does not come from wealth, but. . . wealth, and every other good thing which men have. . . comes from virtue.”
84. "We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime."
85. “Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite concious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
86. "What a lot of things there are a man can do without."
87. "When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love."
88. "Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth."
89. ”Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.”
90. "Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober -- minded men."
91. "Wisdom begins in wonder."
92. “Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
93. "Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live."

Small fragment

In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small fragment.

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
_Bricks to Babel: Selected Writings With
Author's Comments_ [1980], "Epilogue"

Burning books

Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. . . . In this war, we know, books are weapons.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
_Message to American Booksellers Association_ [April 23, 1942]

Real

“Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.”

Jules Verne

Inverting

“It is better to invert reality than to copy it.”

Giuseppe Verdi

Into glory

“And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted dreams,
And into glory peep.”

Henry Vaughn

Graces and Muses

”The number of guests at dinner should not be less than the number of the Graces nor exceed that of the Muses, i.e., it should begin with three and stop at nine.”

Marcus Terentius Varro

Inloveness

“The actual thing - inloveness - requires something like a spark leaping back and forth from one to the other becoming more intense every moment, love building up like voltage in a coil. Here there is no sound of one hand clapping. One who has never been in love might mistake either infatuation or a mixture of affection and sexual attraction for being in love. But when the "real thing" happens, there is no doubt. A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena's growl to be a lion's; but when he hears the lion's growl, he knows damn' well it's a lion. So with the genuine inloveness.”

Sheldon Vanauken

Inner life

“After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.”

Evelyn Underhill

An ocean

"My eyes are an ocean in which my dreams are reflected."

Anna M.Uhlich

Thursday, June 26, 2008

John Milton


1. “Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot, / Which men call earth.”
2. “A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars,—as stars to thee appear
Seen in the galaxy, that milky way
Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powder’d with stars.”
3. “Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part;/ Do thou but thine.”
4. “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
5. “A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
6. “And fast by, hanging in a golden chain,
This pendent world, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude, close by the moon.”
7. "And out of good still to find means of evil."
8. “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”
9. “A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes, and beck’ning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men’s names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.”
10. “Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n.”
11. “Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
12. ”Chaos umpire sits
And by decision more
embroils the fray
by which he reigns: next
him high arbiter
Chance governs all.”
13. “Dark with excessive bright.”
14. “Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.”
15. “Fairy elves, / Whose midnight revels, by a forest side / Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, / Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon / Sits arbitress.”
16. “For books are not absolutely dead things, but... do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless warriors be used, as good almost kill a Man a good Book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
17. “For who would lose, / Though full of pain, this intellectual being, / Those thoughts that wander through eternity, / To perish rather, swallowed up and lost / In the wide womb of uncreated night, / Devoid of sense and motion?”
18. “Freely we serve / Because we freely love, as in our will / To love or not; in this we stand or fall.”
19. ”From Man or Angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge,
His secrets, to be scanned by them who ought
Rather admire. Or, if they list to try
Conjecture, he his fabric of the Heavens
Hath left to their disputes -- perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide
Hereafter, when they come to model Heaven
And calculate the stars: how they will wield
The mighty frame: how build, unbuild, contrive
To save appearances; how gird the Sphere
With Centric and Eccentric scribbled o'er,
Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb.”
20. “From the cheerful ways of men / Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair / Presented with a universal blank / Of nature's works to me expunged and razed, / And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.”
21. “Good, the more communicated, more abundant grows.”
22. “Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source / Of human offspring, sole propriety / In Paradise of all things common else.”
23. “Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee / Jest and youthful jollity, / Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles, / Nods, and becks, and wreathèd smiles.”
24. “He that has light within his own clear breast/ May sit i' th' centre, and enjoy bright day, / But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts/ Benighted walks under the midday sun.”
25. “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.”
26. “Hither, as to their fountain, other stars
Repairing in their golden urns draw light,
And hence the morning planet gilds her horns.”
27. “I am a part of all that I have met.”
28. “Innumerable as the stars of night,
Or stars of morning, dewdrops which the sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower.”
29. “Imparadis'd in one another's arms.”
30. “Implied / Subjection, but required with gentle sway / And by her yielded, by him best received; / Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, / And sweet reluctant amorous delay.”
31. “Into a Limbo large and broad, since called / The paradise of fools, to few unknown.”
32. “I took it for a faery vision
Of some gay creatures of the element,
That in the colours of the rainbow live,
And play i’ th’ plighted clouds.”
33. ”Long is the way / and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.”
34. “Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.”
35. “Myself, and all th' Angelic Host, that stand
In the sight of God enthroned, our happy state
Hold, as you yours, while our obedience hold.
On other surety none: freely we serve,
Because we freely love...”
36. “Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv'st, / Live well, how long or short permit to heav'n.”
37. “Now came still evening on, and twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompany’d; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleas’d. Now glow’d the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveil’d her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.”
38. “. . . Or fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth
Wheels her pale course; they, on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”
39. “Rhetoric . . . To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate.”
40. “Ring out ye crystal spheres!
Once bless our human ears,
If ye have power to touch our senses so;
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time,
And let the bass of Heaven's deep organ blow;
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.”
41. “Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.”
42. “She what was honour knew,
And with obsequious majesty approv’d
My pleaded reason. To the nuptial bower
I led her blushing like the morn; all heaven
And happy constellations on that hour
Shed their selectest influence; the earth
Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill;
Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs
Whisper’d it to the woods, and from their wings
Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub.”
43. “So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life.”
44. ”So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good.”
45. “Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; / The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow / Through Eden took their solitary way.”
46. “Some say no evil thing that walks by night,
In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,
Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine,
Hath hurtful power o’er true virginity.”
47. “Such sober certainly of waking bliss.”
48. “Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.”
49. “That power / Which erring men call Chance.”
50. “The childhood shows the man, / As morning shows the day. Be famous then / By wisdom; as thy empire must extend, / So let extend thy mind o'er all the world.”
51. “The first and wisest of them all professed / To know this only, that he nothing knew.”
52. “The other shape, / If shape it might be called that shape had none.”
53. “The stars, / That nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps / With everlasting oil, to give due light / To the misled and lonely traveller.”
54. “The sum of earthly bliss.”
55. “The sun to me is dark
And silent as the moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.”
56. “Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers.”
57. “Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me; from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature’s works, to me expung’d and raz’d,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.”
58. “Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold.”
59. “'Tis chastity, my brother, chastity;
She that has that is clad in complete steel,
And, like a quiver'd nymph with arrows keen,
May trace huge forests, and unharbour'd heaths,
Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds;
Where, through the sacred rays of chastity,
No savage fierce, bandite, or mountaineer,
Will dare to soil her virgin purity.”
60. "When the waves are round me breaking,
As I pace the deck alone,
And my eye in vain is seeking
Some green leaf to rest upon;
What would not I give to wander
Where my old companions dwell?
Absence makes the heart grow fonder,
Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!"
61. “Where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand;
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce,
Strive here for mast’ry.”
62. “Where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all.”
63. “Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”
64. “With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons, and their change,—all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glist’ring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful ev’ning mild; then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glist’ring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful ev’ning mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon
Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet.”
65. ”Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason its self.”
66. “Yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible.”

Delight

“We cannot keep delight--we cannot tell
One tale of steady bliss, unwarped, uncrost,
The timid guest anticipates his farewell,
And will not stay to hear it from his host!
I saw a child upon a summer's day,
A child upon the margin of a pond,
Catch at the boughs that came within his way,
From a fair fruit-tree on the bank beyond;
The gale that swayed them from him aye arose,
And seldom sank into such kindly calm
As gave his hand upon the bunch to close;
Which then but left its fragrance on his palm;
For the wind woke anew from its repose,
And bore the fruit away, but wafted all its balm.”

Charles Turner

I know the truth

“I know the truth- give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look- it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
What do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.”

Marina Tsvetaeva

Interpretations

“There are several interpretations but it is pointless speculating about them. It is the worst thing that can be done, to speculate before you are in full possession of the facts… To do so means that you will distort those facts in order to fit your theory.”

Peter Tremayne

Wise words

“Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.”

Edward Thorndike

Write!

“Write! Whatever you do, Write! The money you make may be the yardstick for success, but it is not the way you measure satisfaction. I honestly would write for nothing. You have to write from the heart. When you write from the heart you will never regret it. You honestly will never, never, regret any of it.”

James A. Thompson

Unimportant

"He loved her not
with apples or roses or ringlets
but with a real maddness,
and he considered everything else
unimportant."

Theocritus

On fire

“Love is friendship set on fire.”

Jeremy Taylor

Forbidden

“Things forbidden have a secret charm.”

Tacitus

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross


1. ”As I pass from this world to the next, I know that heaven or hell is determined by the way people live their life in this present. The sole purpose of life is to grow. The ultimate lesson is learning how to love and be loved unconditionally. There are millions of people on Earth who are starving. There are millions who are homeless. There are millions who have AIDS. There are millions of people who have been abused. There are millions of people who struggle with disabilities. Every day someone new cries out for understanding and compassion. Listen to the sound. Hear the call as if it were beautiful music. I can assure you that the greatest rewards in your whole life will come from opening your heart to those in need. The greatest blessings always come from offering to help.

I truly believe that my truth is a universal one-above all religions, economics, race, and color, shared by the common experiences of life.

All people come from the same source and return to the same source. We must all learn to love and be loved unconditionally. All the hardships that come to you in life, all the tribulations and nightmares, all the things you see as punishments from God, are in reality like gifts. They are opportunities to grow, which is the sole purpose of life.”
2. “Dying is an integral part of life, as natural and predictable as being born. But whereas birth is cause for celebration, death has become a dreaded and unspeakable issue to be avoided by every means possible in our modern society. Perhaps it is that in spite of all our technological advances. We may be able to delay it, but we cannot escape it. We, no less than other, nonrational animals, are destined to die at the end of our lives. And death strikes indiscriminately- it cares not at all for the status or position of the ones it chooses; everyone must die, whether rich or poor, famous or unknown. Even good deeds will not excues their doers from the sentence of death; the good die as often as the bad. It is perhaps this inevitable and unpredictable quality that makes death so frightening to many people. Especially those who put a high value on being in control of their own existance are offended by the though that they, too care subject to the forces of death.”
3. “For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate
from the thought and study of death.”
4. “Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.”
5. “How do the geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within, if only we would listen to it, that tells us so certainly when to go forth into the unknown.”
6. “I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.”
7. “If we could raise one generation with unconditional love, there would be no Hitlers. We need to teach the next generation of children from Day One that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice.
We can make our choices built from love or from fear.”
8. “If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.”
9. “It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth -- and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up -- that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”
10. "Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself,And know that everything in this life has purpose. There are no mistakes, No coincidences, All events are blessings given to us to learn from."
11. ”Our concern must be to live while we're alive... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.”
12. “People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.”
13. “Should you shield the valleys from the windstorms, you would never see the beauty of their canyons.”
14. “There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”
15. “There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.”
16. "There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning."
17. "The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well."
18. "To love means not to impose your own powers on your fellow man but offer him your help. And
if he refuses it, to be proud that he can do it on his own strength."
19. “Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.”
20. "We are not powerless specks of dust drifting around in the wind, blown by random destiny. We are, each of us, like beautiful snowflakes -- unique, and born for a specific reason and purpose."
21. “We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.”
22. “We need to teach the next generation of children from Day One that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.”

Collaboration

Every sin is the result of collaboration.

Stephen Crane

Troubled prayers

A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of tomorrow's dangers, a straw under my knees, a noise in my ear, a light in my eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayers.

John Donne

Hatred

Hatreds generally spring from fear or envy.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
_The Discourses_ [1517], "Introduction To The Second Book"

Welcome!

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

James Joyce

Italics

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, "the italics are ours."

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882, 'Quotation and Originality' from Letters and Social Aims (1875)

Favorite pleasure

Everyone is dragged on by their favorite pleasure.

Virgil c. 70 - 19 BC

Abused patience

Beware of him that is slow to anger; for when it is long coming, it is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept. Abused patience turns to fury.

Francis Quarles

Filthy ways

Often a noble face hides filthy ways.

Euripides

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The Widower

Nymph



The Widower
Rudyard Kipling



For a season there must be pain-
For a little, little space
I shall lose the sight of her face,
Take back the old life again
While she is at rest in her place.

For a season this pain must endure,
For a little, little while
I shall sigh more often than smile
Till Time shall work me a cure,
And the pitiful days beguile.

For that season we must be apart,
For a little length of years,
Till my life's last hour nears,
And, above the beat of my heart,
I hear Her voice in my ears.

But I shall not understand-
Being set on some later love,
Shall not know her for whom I strove,
Till she reach me forth her hand,
Saying, "Who but I have the right?"
And out of a troubled night
Shall draw me safe to the land.

Grief

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.

From a headstone in Ireland



In my Lucia's absence
Life hangs upon me, and becomes a burden;
I am ten times undone, while hope, and fear,
And grief, and rage and love rise up at once,
And with variety of pain distract me.

Joseph Addison



If you're going through hell, keep going.

Winston Churchill



If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.

Moliere



Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations



“The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief -
But the pain of grief
Is only a shadow
When compared with the pain
Of never risking love.”

Hilary Stanton Zunin



“Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength.”

Ovid



“No greater grief than to remember days of gladness when sorrow is at hand”

Friedrich von Schiller



No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

C.S. Lewis



When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

Christina Rossetti



I'm Gone now, but I'm still very near.
Death can never separate us.
Each time you feel a gentle breeze,
It's my hand caressing your face.
Each time the wind blows,
It carries my voice whispering your name.
When the wind blows your hair ever so slightly,
Think of it as me pushing a few stray hairs back in place.
When you feel a few raindrops fall on your face,
It's me placing soft kisses.
At night look up in the sky and see the stars shining so brightly.
I'm one of those stars and I'm winking at you and smiling with delight.
For never forget you're the apple of my eye.

Mary M. Green

Love and sex

For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.

Isabel Allende



God created sex. Priests created marriage.

Voltaire



The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)



The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.

William B. Yeats



Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.

John Donne, Extasy



It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.

Marge Piercy



"It is not enough to conquer; one must know how to seduce."

Voltaire



"Desire is the essence of a man."

Spinoza



"The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral."

Aristippus



"Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie."

William Shakespeare



"... Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1756 -1791



"Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy."

Anais Nin

Henry Miller


Crete, Greece - 2006

1. “Actors die so loud.”
2. "After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in."
3. "All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."
4. "All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape."
5. "A man of good will with a little effort and belief in his own powers can enjoy a deep, tranquil, rich life -- provided he go his own way. He need not and should not think of making a good living, but rather of creating a good life for himself. To live one's own life is still the best way of life, always was, and always will be."
6. "A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."
7. "Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness."
8. "And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is
human? Divine, in other words?"
9. “And who is the hero? Primarily one who has conquered his fears. One can be a hero in any realm; we never fail to recognize him when he appears. His singular virtue is that he has become one with life, one with himself. Having ceased to doubt and question, he quickens the flow and the rhythm of life. The coward, par contre, seeks to arrest life's flow. He arrests nothing, to be sure, unless it be himself. Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or as heros. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”
10. “A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.”
11. “Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.”
12. "Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself."
13. "Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life."
14. “A toujours.
Memory is the talisman of the sleepwalker on the floor of eternity.
If nothing is lost neither is anything gained.
There is only what endures. I AM.
That covers all experience, all wisdom, all truth.”
15. "Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur."
16. “Be always ecstatic. Be filled with a devine intoxication.”
17. "Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."
18. “Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, pessaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.”
19. "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."
20. "Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
21. ”Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.”
22. "Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe."
23. “Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”
24. “Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.”
25. “Fame is an illusive thing -- here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months.”
26. "History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time."
27. "Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire."
28. "Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say."
29. "How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician."
30. “I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!”
31. "I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!"
32. “I don't want to be bitter about life - about love and friendship and all the human, emotional entanglements. I've had more than my share of human disappointments, deprivations, disillusionment. I want to love people and life above all; I want to be able to say always, "if you feel bitter or disillusioned, there is something wrong with yourself, not with people, not with life."
33. “I feel the world should be run by women. It would be the kind of a world - one world - I have often dreamed about.”
34. “If only I could believe in work. I hate work. Creation is not work - it's play. But who believes in that? I know it's true, but now it's one of those distant truths - as remote as the stars. It's treasonable even to think this way.”
35. ”If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.”
36. "If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having."
37. “If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
38. "I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."
39. “I haven't the slightest fear about the future because I have learned how to live in the present.”
40. "Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."
41. “In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.”
42. "Instead of asking -- ''How much damage will the work in question bring about?'' why not ask -- ''How much good? How much joy?''"
43. "In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor."
44. "In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest."
45. "It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir."
46. “It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.”
47. “It is true I swim in a perpetual sea of sex, but the actual excursions are fairly limited.”
48. “Let each one turn his gaze inward and regard himself with awe and wonder, with mystery and reverence; let each one promulgate his own laws, his own theories; let each one work his own influence, his own havoc, his own miracles. Let each one as an individual, assume the roles of artist, healer, prophet, priest, king, warrior, saint.”
49. "Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets."
50. "Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. "
51. "Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such."
52. "Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another's way of life - so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off!"
53. "Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
54. “Man does not recognize what a gem he has in woman and that through the experience of truly loving her, of giving himself up to her, he learns his greatest lesson in life.”
55. "Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything -- except his own nature."
56. “Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now...”
57. "Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists."
58. "Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines --these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm."
59. “Most of us imagine that we are travelling in a straight line, whereas the truth is that we are moving in circles. We change direction almost without thinking. Headed for Mexico, we land in China. (And like as not, without the slightest loss of face.) The ambitious ones set out to storm the world, only to end up like so many dead leaves scattered by the wind.”
60. “My books are the books that I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man that I am.”
61. “Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene -- nine-tenths of it!”
62. "No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance."
63. "No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe."
64. “No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao tse and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.”
65. “Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.”
66. "One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life."
67. "One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things."
68. "One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one."
69. "Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense."
70. "Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration."
71. "Remorse is impotence, it will sin again. Only repentance is strong, it can end everything."
72. "Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation.The other eight are unimportant".
73. "Sin, guilt, neurosis --they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge."
74. “. . . that's the only death, that's the real death. Not this death when you depart the body, but being dead while you are alive, that's the real death.”
75. "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."
76. ”The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.”
77. "The bulk of my readers, I have often observed, fall into two distinct groups: in the one group those who claim to be repelled or disgusted by the liberal dosage of sex, and in the other those who are delighted to find that this element form such a large ingredient."
78. “The crisis through which we are going . . . is rooted in the fact that we all hold beliefs contrary to our behavior.”
79. "The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal."
80. "The earth is a Paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise -- it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it."
81. “The gulf between knowledge and truth is infinite. Parents talk a lot about truth but seldom bother to deal in it. It's much simpler to dispense ready-made knowledge. More expedient too, for truth demands patience, endless, endless patience. The happiest expedient of all is to bundle kids off to school just as soon as they can stand the strain. There they not only get "learning," which is a crude substitute for knowledge, but discipline.”
82. "The important thing I learned from making watercolours, was not to worry, not to care too much. We don't have to turn out a masterpiece everyday. To paint is the thing, not to make masterpieces."
83. “The land and the water make numbers joined, a poem written with flesh and stronger than steel or granite. Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown.”
84. "The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean -- when boredom seems the very stuff of life."
85. "The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc."
86. ”The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to ahve artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.”
87. “The mission of man on earth is to remember...
To remember, to forget, to decide which it shall be.
We have no choice, we remember everything.
But to forget in order to better remember, ah!
The mission of man on earth is to remember.
To remember to remember.
To taste everything in eternity as once in time.
All happens only once, but that is forever.”
88. “The moment one is on the side of life, "peace and security" drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.”
89. "The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."
90. “The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.”
91. “The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.”
92. “The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.”
93. “The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.”
94. "The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself."
95. "There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our stupidity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it."
96. “The real leader has no need to lead -- he is content to point the way.”
97. “There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.”
98. "There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him."
99. "There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry."
100. "The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you."
101. "The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it."
102. "The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order."
103. “The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives.”
104. "The world is the mirror of myself dying."
105. "The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure."
106. "This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing."
107. “Until it is kindled by a spirit as lovingly alive as the one which gave it birth, a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.”
108. "Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves."
109. “Voyages are accomplished inwardly, and the most hazardous ones, needless to say, are made without moving from the spot.”
110. "We are all guilty of crime the great crime of not living life to the full.

But we are all potentially free.

We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power.
What those powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine.
That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything.
Imagination is the voice of daring.”
111. “We are all part of things,
We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians,
We have only to open up, to discover what is already there.”
112. “We cling to memory in order to preserve an identify which, if we but realized it, can never be lost. When we discover this truth, which is an act of remembrance, we forget everything else.”
113. "We do not talk -- we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests."
114. "We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way."
115. "We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets -- we remember only.
116. ”We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.”
117. “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.”
118. "Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge."
119. “Whatever I do I do first for enjoyment.”
120. "Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed."
121. "What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature."
122. "What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."
123. “What we all hope in reaching for a book, is to meet a man of our own heart, to experience tragedies and delights which we ourselves lack the courage to invite, to dream dreams which will render life more hallucinating, perhaps also to discover a philosophy of life which will make us more adequate in meeting the trials and ordeals which beset us. To merely add to our store of knowledge or improve our culture, whatever that may mean, seems worthless to me.”
124. "What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?"
125. “Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.”
126. “When I say friends, I mean friends. Not anybody and everybody can be your friend. It must be someone as close to you as your skin, someone who imparts color, drama, meaning to your life, however snug and secure it may be.”
127. “When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.”
128. “When you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.”
129. “Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist.”
130. "Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves."
131. “Yes, and always. Always yes. Am here, was gone, and always, yes always, same man, same spot, same hour, same everything.”

Quiet house

”The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.”

Wallace Stevens

Get lost in a book

“Open a book
and before long
you're lost
on seas never crossed
in a dream ship
storm-tossed
that will bring you ashore
where no one's yet been.
There through forests
of green
unknown wild words
you will follow
bluebirds
that lead you to where
in high magic air
you will find a gold door.
Turn the key in the lock,
cross a floor
never crossed.
On a gold table find,
by a lamp's bedside beam,
a great golden book
in whose pages you will
find greater gold still,
world within world,
dream within dream.
Turn a page, have a look.
Get lost in a book.”

William J. Smith

Magic web

”WITHIN your magic web of hair, lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world;
The dire gold of the comet's wind-blown hair;
The songs that turned to gold the evening air
When all the stars of heaven sang for joy.
The flames that burnt the cloud-high city Troy.
The mænad fire of spring on the cold earth;
The myrrh-lit flame that gave both death and birth
To the soul Phoenix; and the star-bright shower
That came to Danaë in her brazen tower...
Within your magic web of hair lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world.”

Edith Sitwell

Draw a crazy picture

"Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before."

Shell Silverstein

About stories

“I will tell you something about stories, (he said)
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off
illness and death”

Silko, Leslie Marmo.

Summer roses

“WHILE summer roses all their glory yield
To crown the votary of love and joy,
Misfortune's victim hails, with many a sigh,
Thee, scarlet Poppy of the pathless field,
Gaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield
Thy flaccid vest, that, as the gale blows high,
Flaps, and alternate folds around thy head. --
So stands in the long grass a love-crazed maid,
Smiling aghast; while stream to every wind
Her garish ribbons, smeared with dust and rain;
But brain-sick visions cheat her tortured mind,
And bring false peace. Thus, lulling grief and pain,
Kind dreams oblivious from thy juice proceed,
Thou flimsy, showy, melancholy weed.”

Anna Seward

King of Dreams

“Some must delve when the dawn is nigh;
Some must toil when the noonday beams;
But when might comes, and the soft winds sigh,
Every man is a King of Dreams.”

Clinton Scollard

An act of faith

“Giving a child a book is an implicit act of faith in the child. When you give a kid a book, you're saying that you believe they have the means within them to understand it, even if at that moment they haven't yet learned the skill. Kids know this, you know, even if they don't always have the means to express it. They know what books are, and they know what they represent. When you give a kid a book and say this is for you, those four words encompass more than the paper-and-binding object you're pressing into their hands. They encompass everything we understand. Most of the time, kids get that on one level or another. And even when they don't you can still see them flip through the pages of a book, sucking up everything in them and imagining the world in the book that takes place off the edge of the paper. Book imply more -- more words, more pictures, more adventures, more understanding.”

John Scalzi

Cunning weaver

“Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables.”

Sappho

Obvious

”Never assume the obvious is true.”

William Safire

Quality

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

Marcus Aurelius

Creative people

"Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane."

R.D. Laing

Be everything

It's dangerous
to be something;
it's foolish
to be nothing;
it's wise
to be everything.

Swami Amar Jyoti

How?

How can finite grasp infinity?

John Dryden

Wine

Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief.

Virginia Woolf 1882-1941

Monday, June 16, 2008

Gentleman

The devil is and always has been a gentleman.

Diane LaVey

George Berkeley


Knossos, Greece - 2006

1. "All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind."
2. "I have no reason for believing the existence of matter. I have no immediate intuition thereof: neither can I immediately, from any sensations, ideas, notions, actions or passions infer an unthinking, unperceiving, inactive substance - either by probable deduction or necessary consequence."
3. "The brain therefore you speak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind."
4. "Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowled ge, are entirely owing to ourselves. We have first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see.
5. "Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties"

I have been here before

”I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet, keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,--
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at the swallow's soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall--I knew it all of yore.

Then, now,--perchance again!...
O round mine eyes your tresses shake!
Shall we not lie as we have lain
Thus for Love's sake,
And sleep, and wake, yet never break the chain?”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Exhilarating

”After love, book collecting is the most exhilarating sport of all.”

Rosenbach, Abraham Wolf.

Black

“Black is the queen of colors.”

Auguste Rodin

Embracing the storm

“Even that which is beautiful
Can sometimes bring pain,
So to love from the heart,
Is to invite the rain.
But to reach for the rose,
You must fear not the thorn,
So to love from the soul,
Is to embrace the storm.”

Helen Steiner Rice

As real as

“Dreams can be as real as events.”

Anne Rice

Hate and love

"In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul."

Mary Renault

Take any path

“Take any path, and follow it
till every path becomes your own,
till all things are yours,
all living belovèd
till all paths take you
along the path which is yourself.”

Catriona Reed

Delicious ambiguity

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity."

Gilda Radner

Vacuum

“Nature abhors a vacuum.”

François Rabelais

Kindler and rekindler

“Kindler and rekindler of universes, the fire burns forever. It is the flame of life that courses through all generations from first to last, that burns without consuming, that is itself consumed and renewed inexhaustibly, life after life, generation after generation, species after species, galaxy after galaxy, universe after universe, each sharing in the blaze for its season and going down to death while the fire burns on undiminished. The fire is life itself, the life of this universe, of this galaxy, of this planet, of this place and every place: the place by the rock and the place under the hill and the place by the river and the place in the forest, no two are alike anywhere. And the life of every place is god, who is the fire: the life of the pond, god; the life of the tundra, god; the life of the sea, god; the life of the land, god; the life of the earth, god; the life of the universe, god: in every place unique, as the life of every place is unique, and in every place the same, as the fire that burns is everywhere the fire of life.”

Daniel Quinn

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Because I am musically inspired today...

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski


Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach


All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! ~Thomas Carlyle


If the King loves music, it is well with the land. ~Mencius


Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~Gustav Mahler


Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke


And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done


He who sings scares away his woes. ~Cervantes


Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ~Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name


Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli


Music is what feelings sound like. ~Author Unknown


There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron


Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. ~Henri Rabaud


Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter


If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth. Sydney Smith


There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is. ~William P. Merrill


Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. ~Henry David Thoreau


Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven


I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality. ~H.A. Overstreet


My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require. ~Edward Elgar


Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
~Oliver Wendell Holmes


Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. ~Charlie Parker


Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. ~William F. Buckley, Jr.


Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself. ~Henry Ward Beecher


Play the music, not the instrument. ~Author Unknown


Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. ~Ludwig van Beethoven


Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. ~Robert Fripp


[An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger. ~John Chesson


Music's the medicine of the mind. ~John A. Logan


You are the music while the music lasts. ~T.S. Eliot


Music is the universal language of mankind. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer


Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. ~Ezra Pound


He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning


You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. ~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket


The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet. ~Oliver Herford


What we provide is an atmosphere... of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way. Under its influence I've seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell. ~Meyer Davis, about his orchestra


Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo


...where music dwells
Lingering - and wandering on as loth to die...
~William Wordsworth, "Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge"



Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. ~Buffy Sainte-Marie


Music is an outburst of the soul. ~Frederick Delius


Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde


In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886


If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. ~John Cage


Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett


Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll


Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine


There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
~William Cowper


When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine


Truly to sing, that is a different breath. ~Rainer Maria Rilke


Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy


There is no truer truth obtainable
By Man than comes of music.
~Robert Browning


Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific. ~Aaron Copland


What passion cannot music raise and quell! ~John Dryden


The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial. ~Leonard Bernstein


Music, when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory -
~Percy Bysshe Shelley


A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green


The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel


The pause is as important as the note. ~Truman Fisher


The city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built forever.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson


Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan


Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius


Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country. ~Edmund G. Brown


Music can noble hints impart,
Engender fury, kindle love,
With unsuspected eloquence can move,
And manage all the man with secret art.
~Joseph Addison


My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle. ~Liberace


Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson


The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life… the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril. ~Richard Baker


Music is the medicine of the breaking heart. ~Leigh Hunt


Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Comments of Abe Martin and His Neighbors, 1923


Country music is three chords and the truth. ~Harlan Howard


An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like. From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts. ~Kit Coleman, Kit Coleman: Queen of Hearts


I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley


Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton


A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it? ~Charles Ives


The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic. ~Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz


After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays


Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier


It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de LaPrade


Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter


Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker. ~William Green


If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. ~Simon Rattle


Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all. ~Helmut Walcha


I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin


The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief. ~S.A. Sachs


Music is well said to be the speech of angels. ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays, "The Opera"


Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. ~Robert Benchley


No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. ~W.H. Auden, Time, 29 December 1961


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