Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Music
- "Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside
of us."
Unknown
- Red Auerbach: "Music washes away from the soul the dust of
everyday life.
- Joseph Addison: "Music, the
greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below."
- Henry Giles:
"A song will outlive all sermons in the memory."
- Elvis Presley: "I don't know anything about music. In my
line you don't have to."
- M. Aumonier: "There is always music amongst the trees in
the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it."
- Edgar Yipsel Harburg: "Words make you think a thought.
Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought."
| Isadore (Friz) Freleng, directing more Warner Bros. cartoons than
anyone (266), often injected his passion for music into his work. Probably his
greatest toon-musicals were his visualizations of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No.
2, an example of which is his 1946 Rhapsody Rabbit (above): Bugs performs a
concerto while dealing with the piano's resident mouse. |
- Anais Nin: "Music melts all the separate parts of our
bodies together."
- Yehudi Menuhin: "Music creates order
out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes
continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the
incongruous."
- Chet Atkins, Mister Guitar in Zen Guitar:
"Approach your guitar intelligently, and if there are limits, don't deny them. Work
within your restrictions. Somethings you can do better than others, some things you can't
do as well. So accentuate the positive... It takes a lot of devotion and work, or maybe I
should say play, because if you love it, that's what it amounts to I haven't found any
shortcuts, and I've been looking for a long time."
- Eric Anderson: "It is only by introducing the young to
great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to
them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit -- enable them to see visions and
dream dreams."
- Unknown: "Most of us go to our grave with our music still
inside of us."
- Albert Schweitzer: "There are two means of refuge from the
miseries of life: music and cats."
- Victor Hugo: "Music expresses that which cannot be put into
words and that which cannot remain silent."
Buddy Holly:
September 7, 1936 - February 3, 1959 |
| Buddy Holly and the Crickets were the first self-contained
rock-'n-roll group that wrote and performed their own songs -- sales for which have now
reached 40 million. Buddy's hit songs -- such as Maybe, Baby and Oh, Boy!
and his electrifying performances of them -- are nothing short of incredibile: pure,
sweet, unadulterated rock-'n-roll. His meteoric rise ended as quickly; he was only 22 at
the end. Holly toured with Ritchie Valens and "The Big Bopper," J.P. Richardson;
their buses kept breaking down. After a concert at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa,
Holly chartered a small plane to get the musicians to the next town, Moorhead, Minnesota.
On the morning of February 3rd, the plane carrying Holly, Valens and Richardson took off
from Mason City, Iowa. The plane crashed after traveling eight miles; all on board were
killed: "The Day the Music Died." |
- Hans Christian Andersen: "Where words fail, music
speaks."
- Oscar Hammerstein: "All the sounds of the earth are like
music."
- Ursula K. Le Guin: "It had never occurred to me before that
music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of
thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music."
- Richard Strauss: "I may not be a first-class
composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer."
- Jean Genet: "Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much
something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory,
inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has
always been shut up silent within me."
- Lorenzo, The Merchant of Venice: "The
man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his
spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let
no such man be trusted."
- Author Unknown: "Music speaks what
cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it
whole, flows from heaven to the soul."
- Plato: "Music gives a soul to the
universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to
everything."
- Dr. Max Bendiner: "Music may achieve the highest of all
missions: She may be a bond between nations, races and states, who are strangers to one
another in many ways; She may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is
hostile."
- Beethoven: "Music is a higher
revelation than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which the
spirit lives, thinks and invents."
- Quote from outside an old opera house: "Bach
gave us God's Word. Mozart gave us God's laughter. Beethoven gave us God's fire. God gave us Music that we might pray without words."
- Albert Einstein, asked about his theory of relativity: "It
occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My
discovery was the result of musical perception."
- Henry van Dyke: "Use the talents you
possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best."
- Harlan Howard: "Country music is three chords and the
truth."
- Bill Nye: "Wagner's music is
better than it sounds."
- Albert Camus: "Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will
move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which
banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel.
Art does not tolerate Reason."
- B.J. Thomas, I Believe In Music: "I believe in
music, I believe in love. Music is the universal language and love is the key -- to
brotherhood, peace and understanding, living in harmony. So take your brother by the hand
and sing along with me..."
- Yo-Yo Ma, cellist: "What I look for in musicians is
generosity. There is so much to learn from each other... Great creativity begins with
tolerance."
- B. H. Haggin, The Listener's Musical Companion: "If
you don't understand what Beethoven 'says,' the reason is that the sounds he uses are not
a meaningful language for you; and the thing to do is to learn this
language as you would any other ... Which is to say that you will have to listen to
Beethoven's music, and keep listening ... just as the way to understand a poem is to read
it, and the way to understand a painting is to look at it, so the way -- the only way --
to understand a piece of music is to listen to it, and to keep listening."
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