Reaching For Stars

"I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades."

Walt Whitman

"Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a society. Ideas are patterns of value."

Robert T. Pirsig

"Spirit is dreaming in man."

Søren Kierkegaard

"The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself."

G. W. F. Hegel

"The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all."

Pablo Casals

"If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."

Oscar Wilde

"Music is the best means we have of digesting time."

W. H. Auden

"The love of one's country is a natural thing. But why should love stop at the border?"

Pablo Casals

"The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music."

Aaron Copland

"Even if my memory were to fail me in the future, I would still be able to retrace with certainty the footsteps of my soul."

Ye Si

"Let the ancient serve the present, let the foreign serve the national; by developing that which has been accomplished, one creates something that is new."

Mao Zedong

"The genuine knowledge originates in direct experience."

Mao Zedong

A friend is a second self.

Aristotle

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Aristotle

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

Aristotle

One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

Aristotle

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do.

Aristotle

Hope is a waking dream.

Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

It is possible to fail in many ways...while to succeed is possible only in one way.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Aristotle, Rhetoric

"The focal point of all reforms should be human liberation, and the respect for human value and human rights. The free development of each individual is the basis for all social progress."

Xu Wenli

"To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality."

Anita Roddick

"If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves."

Lane Kirkland

"Solve the problem yourself or accept a fate you may not like...from this perspective, the ethic of personal responsibility gains appeal."

Noel M. Tichy

"Anyone who sees in his own occupation merely a means of earning money degrades it; but he that sees in it a service to mankind ennobles both his labor and himself."

A. Lawrence Lowell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love."

Yevgeny Zamyatin

"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

Mother Jones

"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."

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

Anaïs Nin

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"One cannot really enjoy speed to the absolute limit if there's a destination involved."

Stirling Moss

"Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!"

Luigi Pirandello

"Hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience."

Italo Calvino

"There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting can never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it."

Marsha Norman

“The past exists only in our memories,
The future only in our plans.
The present is our only reality.”

-Robert Pirsig

“Motivation is what gets yous tarted, habit is what keeps you going.”

-Jim Rohn

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”

-Albert Einstein

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul.  Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”

-Pamela Vaull Starr

"Each one of us has a fire in our heart for something.  It's our goal to find it and keep it."  -Mary Lou Retton

“Dream more than others think practical.  Expect more than others think possible”

-Howard Schultz

"Every people should be left free to determine its own policy, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful... These are American principles."
-Woodrow Wilson