'Once Upon My Cheek'

'Flight of the Bumblebee'

End of Year Dances

Upcoming Performances

Quotes that keep me going

Compiled over the years by Dr. Sera Smolen

 

Music exists for the purpose of growing an admirable heart.

–Dr. Shinichi Suzuki

 

Philosophy is the King; music is the Queen. – Anthony Damiani

 

The hero is he who is immovably centered. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The artist’s task consists of making one thing of many, and a

world from the smallest part of a thing. – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

It naturally elevates the soul to feel this intimate relationship to

it’s primal ground…A man then feels himself truly at home, and

whenever he is lifted up through music he can say to himself:

“Yes, you come from other worlds, and in music you can

experience your native place.”- Rudolf Steiner

 

Insist on yourself. Never imitate. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

You cannot teach anyone anything. You can only help them

discover it inside themselves. – Galileo

 

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be

released. – Jean Housten

 

Decide to be your best. In the long run the world is going to

want and have the best, and that might as well be you.

 –Booker T Washington

 

March to the beat of your own drummer. – Henry David Thoreau

 

The cello, because:

Because I could not stand, I leaned on you

Because when I could not speak, you gave me words

Because when I went blind to the hardest of truths to learn

With your strength you pried the darkness

And from it, drew a song.

-Laura Cape-Gill, Ashville, NC

My idea is that there is music in the air. The world is full of it,

and you simply take as much as you require.

 – Sir Edward Elgar

 

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a

butterfly. – Buckminster Fuller

 

Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human

soul will never be found in another. –Elizabeth Cady Stanton

 

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region unlit by any

star but it’s own, and utterly without meaning except it’s own.

--Leonard Bernstein

 

The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but

rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits

the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes

itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and

dreams of. – Charles Ives

 

Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new

paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal.

 – Pierre Boulez

 

If you would know if a people are well governed, and if it’s laws

are good or bad, examine the music it practices. – Confucius

 

The biggest crime is not developing your potential. When you do

what you do best, you are helping others. – Roger Williams

 

I dream for a living. – Stephen Spielberg

 

We need to make the world safe for the creativity and intuition

that will make the world safe for us.

– Edgar Mitchell, Apollo Astronaut

 

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on

us. – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Always keep in mind that your own resolution to succeed is

more important than any other thing. – Abraham Lincoln

 

The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a

time. – Abraham Lincoln

 

To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also

dream. Not only plan, but also believe. – Anatole France

 

In all teaching there must be a fusion of authority

as an adult providing a stable framework for the

children in one’s care, and humility as another human being

ready to educate an equal who may turn out to be a superior.

 –Yehudi Menuhin

 

It is difficult to get the news from poems. But men die miserably

every day for the lack of what is found there.

 –William Carlos Williams

 

Art sweeps the everyday dust from your soul. – Pablo Picasso

 

The wind blowing. Adore the sound. – Pythagoras

 

Love, love, love: That is the soul of genius. – W. A. Mozart

 

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.

 –Friedrich Nietzsche

 

To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a

way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

– Nelson Mandela

 

When you’re in the practice room, you should be doing

something that results in a change. – Peter Wiley

 

It takes courage for people to listen to their own goodness and

to act on it. – Pablo Casals

 

An education not founded on Art will never succeed.

– Margaret Mead

 

To live the creative life, you must lose the fear of being wrong.

 –Joseph Chilton Pearce

 

One’s capacity for metaphor is one’s capacity for a full life.

 –Joseph Chilton Pearce

 

I get my ideas from listening from within. – Thomas Edison

 

Artists are messengers whose responsibility it is to unite the

world, not to destruction, but to transformation. – Alice Walker

 

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed

to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human

spirit. – Helen Keller

 

When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go

wrong. – Yo Yo Ma

 

The purpose of Art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state

of wonder and serenity. – Glenn Gould

 

If you want to draw, you must close your eyes and sing.

– PabloPicasso

 

Nobody has ever measured—even poets—how much the heart

can hold. – Zelda Fitzgerald

 

Most of my ideas belonged to other people who didn’t bother to

develop them. – Thomas Edison

 

Be the change you want to see in the world. – Mahatma Ghandi

 

Music is in the space between the notes. – Claude Debussy

 

Whatever you dream or think you can do, begin it! Boldness

has genius, magic and power in it. – Johann von Goethe

 

A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings

because it has a song. – Proverb

 

It is always the best with me when I have the chisel in my

hand. – Michelangelo

 

Nothing great was ever created without enthusiasm.

– RalphWaldo Emerson

 

Whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its

birthplace. – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

 

The artist must raise the cup of his vision aloft to the gods in the

high hope that they will pour into it the sweet mellow wine of

inspiration. – Paul Brunton

 

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other,

because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward

places of the soul. – Plato

 

Often a single experience will open the young soul to music for a

lifetime. This experience cannot be left to chance. It is the duty

of the school to provide it. - Zoltan Kodaly

 

In Art, and in the higher reaches of science, there is a feeling of

harmony that underlies all endeavor. - Albert Einstein

 

Wherever you are is the entry point! – Kabir

 

It is the use of creativity which heals the creative wound. – Julia

Cameron

 

With every born human, a poet-as- artist is born, who dies

young and who is survived by an adult.

 – Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

 

A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life.

 – HalBorland

 

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you

in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more

you do it, the better you get at it. – Natalie Goldberg

 

I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that.

Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

– Pearl Buck

 

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration.

–Igor Stravinsky

 

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.

 –Sigmund Freud

 

Great improvisers are like priests. They are always listening to

their god. – Stephan Grapelli

 

Let the beauty we love be what we do. – Rumi

 

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.

 –George F. Will

 

The song still remains which names the land over which it

sings. – Martin Heidegger

 

When they are in nature, people sense intuitively that the other

kingdoms are living in harmony with universal law. In such an

environment, it’s easier for the heart to open, to become softer

and live in tune with the earth.

 – Wabun (Sun Bear’s medicine helper)

 

It is the child that sees the primordial secret in Nature and it is

the child of ourselves we return to. The child within us is

simple and daring enough to live the Secret. – Lao Tzu

 

It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

– Barry Lopez

 

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man

does with what happens to him. – Aldous Huxley

 

Whenever two people meet, there are really six present: There is

each man as he sees himself, each as the other person sees

him, and each man as he really is. – William James

 

Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with

Truth. – Thich Nhat Hanh

 

The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing

because we love the world. – Natalie Goldberg

 

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to

aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

 –W. H. Auden

 

Learning is movement from moment to moment. – Krishnamurti

 

Art is not just ornamental, an enhancement of life, but a path in

itself, a way out of the predictable and conventional, a map to

self-discovery. – Gabrielle Roth

 

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

 –Thomas Merton

 

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same

time. – Thomas Merton

 

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over

the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper,

from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. – Pablo Picasso

 

A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the

range and character of his deepest sympathies. – Willa Cather

 

I think, to a poet, the human community is like the community of

birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons

we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of

sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

–Sharon Olds

 

Learn to see, and then you’ll know that there is no end to the

new worlds for our vision. – Carlos Castaneda

 

Merely looking at the world around us is immensely different

from seeing it. – Frederick Frank

 

The local painters were my idols…These artists, too, were

grown-ups, but they were grown-ups who could still see! Their

eye was still in love! Like mine! – Frederick Frank

 

When the eye wakes up to see again, it suddenly stops taking

anything for granted. – Frederick Frank

 

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives

you a deeper understanding. – Vincent van Gogh

 

One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it,

you have no certainty until you try. – Sophocles

 

An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much

as invocation. – Lewis Hyde

 

Listen. Make a way for yourself inside yourself. Stop looking in

the other way of looking. – Rumi

 

A working artist is a playing artist. – Julia Cameron

 

The creative mind plays with objects it loves. – Carl Jung

 

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to

make something and not acting on it that causes pain….A day

when I don’t write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is

affection, enthusiasm, adventure—any number of other words

besides discipline. – Julia Cameron

 

Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic.

 –Pablo Picasso

 

Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but

ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force it’s sap, and stands

confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward

summer may not come. – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

I paint the way some people write an autobiography.  The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.  –Pablo Picasso

 

The truth dazzles gradually, or else the world would be blind.

 –Emily Dickenson

 

Art does not reproduce the invisible; rather, it makes visible.

 –Paul Klee

 

When the human being hears music, he has a sense of wellbeing,

because these tones harmonize with what he has

experienced in the world of his spiritual home. – Rudolf Steiner

 

Work with sound until you are absolutely amazed that you can

produce such a sound and it seems to you that you are just the

instrument to which the divine pied piper blows the whisper of

the incantations of his magic spell. – Vilayat Inayat Khan

 

In writing songs, I have learned as much from Cezanne as I

have from Woody Guthrie. – Bob Dylan

 

No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African

drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and

retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality.

– Aldous Huxley

 

I want to sing as birds sing. Not worrying who hears or what

they think. – Rumi

 

Painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart.

--Pablo Picasso

 

If someone strikes my heart, it does not break, but it bursts, and

the flame coming out of it becomes a torch on my path.

– Hazrat Inayat Khan

If one is a master of one thing and understands one thing well,

one has at the same time insight into and understanding of

many things. – Vincent van Gogh

 

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up.. – Pablo Picasso

 

Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a way of being.

 –Frederick Frank

 

The best way out is always through. – Robert Frost

 

Perform every act in life as thought it were your last.

– Marcus Aurelius

 

If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have

convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be

always beginning: to be a beginner. – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Jump. – Joseph Campbell

 

Art is never chaste—Pablo Picasso

 

The world of reality has its limits. The world of imagination is

boundless. – Jean Jaques Rousseau

 

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new

landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust

 

If the doors to perception were cleansed, everything would

appear to man as it is, infinite. – William Blake

 

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth

sometimes comes to the top. – Virginia Woolf

 

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It

is the power of all true art and science. – Albert Einstein

 

Noone can make you feel inferior without your consent.

–Eleanor Roosevelt

Talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We

use it. – Maya Angelou

 

Make haste slowly. – Augustus Caezar

 

Without discipline there is no life at all. – Katharine Hepburn

 

We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.

 –Helen Keller

 

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a

master. – Ernest Hemingway

 

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and learn to

love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books

that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the

answer, which cannot be given you because you would not be

able to live them. – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Where words fail, music speaks. – Hans Christian Anderson

 

All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.

–Louis Armstrong

 

Painting is not made to decorate walls.  It is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.  –Pablo Picasso

 

When you got to ask what jazz is, you’ll never get to know.

 –Louis Armstrong

 

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

 –Berthold Auerbach

 

Competitions are for horses, not for artists. – Bela Bartok

 

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual

life. – Ludwig von Beethoven

 

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by

forgetting ideas which one has no time to write down.

– HectorBerlioz

 

Music…can name the unnamable and communicate the

unknowable. – Leonard Bernstein

 

It is cruel…that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty

of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom--the beauty of

disappointment, and never-satisfied love--the cruel beauty of

nature, and the everlasting beauty of monotony.

– Benjamin Britten

 

The old idea…of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and

sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for

sleeping. – Benjamin Britten

 

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and

never dies. – Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

 

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

 

When we separate music from life, we get art. – John Cage

 

New music: new listening

Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for,

if something were being said, the sounds would be given the

shapes of word. Just an attention to the activity of sounds.

–John Cage

 

Music is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which

leads us to the edge of an infinite, and impels us for a moment

to gaze into that. – Thomas Carlyle

 

See deep enough, and you see musically. – Thomas Carlyle

 

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central

essence of us, song-- as if all the rest were but wrappers and

hulls. – Thomas Carlyle

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing

among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It

brings us near to the infinite. – Thomas Carlyle

 

For me, Bach is like Shakespeare. He has known all and felt

all. He is everything. –Pablo Casals

 

Music hath charms to soothe a savage beast, to soften rocks, or

bend a knotted oak. – William Congreve

 

Music was known and understood before words were spoken.

 –Charles Darwin

 

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

 

When I paint, I reel that all the artists of the past are behind me.

--Pablo Picasso

 

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. – Duke Ellington

 

Music comes first from my heart, and then goes upstairs to my

head where I check it out. – Roberta Flack

 

Composing is like making love to the future. – Lukas Foss

 

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the

people and their time. My people are Americans and my time is

today. – George Gershwin

 

It sounds simple, of course, but personally I can think of no

more mentally arduous task than making music.

 – George Gershwin

 

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of

oranges. – Benny Green

 

The best way to get to know any bunch of people is to go and

listen to their music. – Woody Guthrie

 

When people come to play music as they do to play bridge,

civilization will have taken the longest stride forward since the

beginning of time. – Jascha Heifetz

 

Have no fear of perfection.  You will never reach it.—Salvadore Dali

 

If I don’t practice one day, I know it: two days, the critics know

it: three days, the public knows it. – Jascha Heifetz

 

When words leave off, music begins. – Heinrich Heine

 

Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in

them! – Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the

inexpressible is music. – Aldous Huxley

 

Those who do not want to imitate anything, will produce nothing.

--Salvadore Dali

 

The history of a people is found in its songs. – George Jellinek

 

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

 

Music is the universal language of mankind.

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains,

airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

 –Witold Lutoslawsky

 

Music—the mosaic of the air. – Andrew Marvell

 

I can hold a note as long as the Chase National Bank.

– Ethel Merman

 

To play great music, you must keep your eyes on a distant star.

– Yehudi Menhuhin

 

Information is not knowledge.

Knowledge is not wisdom.

Wisdom is not truth.

Truth is not beauty.

Beauty is not love.

Love is not music.

Music is the best.

--Frank Zappa

 

The power of music is so great that in the legends of all nations,

the invention of the art is ascribed to the gods. – Karl Merz

 

I never use a score when conducting my orchestra…Does a lion

tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?

– Dmitiri Mitropoulos

 

Only life suffered can transform a symphony from a collection of

notes into a message for humanity. – Dmitiri Mitropoulos

 

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom.

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach

you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no

boundary line to art. – Charlie Parker

 

Music is an invisible dance, as dancing is silent music.

– Jean Paul

 

Music is the only one of the fine arts in which not only man, but

all other animals have a common property. – Jean Paul

 

Music is to the mind as air is to the body. – Plato

 

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the

pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides!

 –Artur Schnabel

 

When you play, do not trouble yourself as to who is listening.

Yet always play as though a master listened to you.

 – Robert Schumann

 

If we were all determined to play the first violin, we should

never have a complete orchestra. Therefore respect every

musician in his proper place. – Robert Schumann

 

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, the, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.. – William Shakespeare

 

Only music has the ability to take  you to the edge of reality and allow you to peek in for a moment.  –Alexander Pope

 

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. – William Shakespeare

 

The highest reaches of music come thrillingly close to the central

core and essence of life itself. – Leopold Stokowski

 

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears

also. – Igor Stravinsky

 

Music is the crystallization of sound. –Henry David Thoreau

 

The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.

–Walt Whitman

 

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your

days are your sonnets. – Oscar Wilde

 

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

 –Ralph Vaughan Williams

 

There are no small parts.  Only small actors.  –The “Fantastics”

 

My own thing is in my head. I hear sounds, and if I don’t get

them together, nobody else will. – Jimi Hendrix

 

Study as if you were to live forever;live as if you were to die tomorrow.

-Sir Edmund of Abingdon

 

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.

–Chet Atkins

 

The focus of my playing is the groove, and every time I find a

new rhythm, I find I can write a bunch of new songs. Learning

how to dance, or drum, or to swing my body in a new way is

the fundamental way I find a new riff. Because when you learn

to swing your body in a new way, you begin to swing with your

instrument differently. – Stone Gossard, Pearl Jam

 

The music has generated all the techniques I use. When I sit

down to learn to play something…it is not because I want to

master a technique. It is because I want to hear what an idea

sounds like. – Pat Martino

 

I don’t think you can ever do your best. Doing your best is a

process of trying to do your best. – Townes van Zandt

 

Science without religion is lame; Religion without science is blind.

--Albert Einstein

 

I’m only 49 years old. I’m still in the middle of this whole thing.

I don’t feel like it’s finished at all. I’m still planning to write

better songs. – Paul McCartney

 

I don’t think of myself as a symbol of the sixties, but I do think

of myself as a symbol of following through on your beliefs.

 –Joan Baez

 

Not everyone is going to like what I do, and that’s something I

can accept; if everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn’t be

playing anything of depth. – Joshua Redman

 

I try to be prepared for the moment, through understanding, and

being warmed up, knowing all about chords and scales, so I

don’t even have to think and I can get right to what it is I want

to say. –Pat Metheny

 

You might not feel like playing pretty all the time. Instead, you

might want to play something nasty….you might want to play

something out of context with the tune. It might be a note that

creates so much tension it becomes unpleasant, but you want it

to sound that way. – George Benson

 

You can tell whether a person plays well or not by the way he

carries the instrument, whether it means something to him or

not. – Miles Davis

 

Every guitarist has a special quality of sound. The best ones

will use a good ear, much sensitivity and a thorough knowledge

of music to prepare the nuances and colors of sound.

– Andres Segovia

 

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth. You never have to

worry about repeating the same lie, if you told the truth. You

don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again,

you don’t have to think about it or worry about it…because

there it is. It’s you. – BB King

 

Go placidly amid the noise and the hast, and remember what peace there may be in silence. –Max Ehrmann

 

I don’t care who likes it or buys it, because if you use that

criterion, Mozart would never have written Don Giovanni,

Charlie Parker would never have played anything but swing

music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and

say, this is what I have to do. –Branford Marsalis

 

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he

knows how to listen. – Duke Ellington

 

Whether you are playing in the bar, the church, the strip joint, or

the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to complement and

enhance life. – Carlos Santana

 

Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside

you, and take some of you with it when it leaves.

–Henry Threadgill

 

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what

we give. –Winston Churchill

 

The slower you practice, the faster you learn.

The faster you practice, the slower you learn. – John Kendall

 

Beautiful tone, beautiful heart. – Dr. Shinichi Suzuki

 

You have learned the notes. You have learned the bowings.

Now the lessons can begin. – Dr. Shinichi Suzuki

 

Genius is 1% inspiration and 95% perspiration. –Thomas Edison

 

I am always doing things I can’t do. That’s how I get to do

them. – Pablo Picasso

 

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on

it you can. – Danny Kaye

 

Keep me from the wisdom which does not , from

the philosophy which does not laugh, and from the greatness

which does not bow down before children. – Kahil Gibran

 

Science is for those who learn; poetry is for those who know.

 –Joseph Roux

 

We are capable of much more than we think we are. – Lao Tzu

 

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.  –George Elliot

 

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes

and wishes, where we face it as free beings, admiring, asking,

and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science.

–Albert Einstein

 

Imagination is the beginning of creation. We imagine what we

desire; we will what we imagine; and at last we create what we

will. – George Bernard Shaw

 

At least once a day, allow yourself to think and dream for

yourself. – Albert Einstein

 

Paint as you like, and die happy. – Henry Miller

 

A god can do it. But will you tell me how a man can penetrate

through the lyre’s strings? – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.—Graham Greene

 

Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it,

but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise

and I’m in good form, I’m like somebody half sleeping. I even

forget there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like

priests; they are thinking only of their god. – Stephan Grappelli

 

The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom

in a single moment. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot

write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

– Arnold Schoenberg

 

There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the

development of a creative life is an open-ended series of

provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint,

because it is the journey into the soul. - Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Looking at the creative process is like looking into a crystal: no

matter which facet we gaze into, we see all the others reflected.

- Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards. –Jesuit Maxim

 

Every attempt we make is imperfect; yet each one of those

imperfect attempts is an occasion for a delight unlike anything

else on earth. - Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Every conversation is a form of Jazz. The activity of

instantaneous creation is as ordinary to us as breathing.

 - Stephen Nachmanovich

 

He who binds to himself a joy

Doth the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in Eternity’s sunrise. – William Blake

 

As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I

am not in the creativity business; I am in the surrender

business. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Surrender means cultivating a comfortable attitude toward not knowing,

being nurtured by the mystery of moments that are

dependably surprising, ever fresh. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in

perpetual motion, and a perpetual invitation to create.

-–Stephen Nachmanovich

 

The unexamined life is not worth living.—Socrates

 

The fact that improvisation vanishes makes us appreciate that

every moment of life is unique—a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a

joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each

happens only once in the history of the universe.

 – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is

translated through you into action, and because there is only

one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you

block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be

lost. – Martha Graham

 

When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are

actually following a very intricate design. This kind of freedom

is the opposite of “just anything”. - – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but

from three billion years of organic evolution

– Stephen Nachmanovich

 

A man’s prayer is answered only if he takes his heart into his hand.

--Talmud

 

If you forget yourself, you become the universe. – Hakuin

 

If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between

language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.

 –Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Here the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering

deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an

ancient civilization, but something as yet unborn, unseen,

unheard, except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just

removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is

removing apparent surface from the Self, revealing his original

nature. - – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

There is nothing to it.  You only have to hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.—J.S. Bach

 

To be rationally minded, the mental process of the intuitive

appears to work backward. His conclusions are reached before

his premises. This is not because the steps which connect the

two have been omitted, but because those steps are taken by

the unconscious. – Frances Wickes

 

Mastery means responsibility, ability to respond in real time to

the need of the moment. Intuitive or inspired living means not

just passively hearing the voice, but acting on it.

 – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse

and learn to respond to her call. - – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Technique itself springs from play, because we can acquire

technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently

experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits

and resistances.  – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

The temple bell stops, but sound keeps ringing from the flowers.

--Basho, Japan,,, 17th century

 

Play cannot be defined, because in play all definitions slither,

dance, combine, break apart, and recombine.

– Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into it’s secrets.  For it and knowledge can raise men to the Divine.  –Ludwig von Beethoven

 

This is the evolutionary value of play- play makes us flexible.

By reinterpreting reality and begetting novelty, we keep from

becoming rigid. Play enables us to rearrange our capacities and

our very identity so that they can be used in unforeseen ways.

 -– Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Anthropologists have found “galumphing” to be one of the prime

talents that characterize higher life forms.

 – Stephen Miller, American Anthropologist

 

Play, creativity, art, spontaneity, all these experiences are their

own rewards and are blocked when we perform for reward or

punishment, profit or loss. - – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of

subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure that it is

the antithesis of self-consciousness. - – Aaron Copeland

 

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician.  I often think in music.  I live my daydreams in music.  I see my life in terms of music.

--Albert Einstein

 

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. –Leonard Bernstein

 

If I “try” to play, I fail; if I force the play, I crush it; if I race, I

trip. Any time I stiffen or brace myself against some error or

problem, the very act of bracing would cause the problem to

occur. The only road to strength is vulnerability.

 – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will

be very real. - – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much

he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing

things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only

a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those

become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as

profligate as nature. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

New organs of perception come into being as a result of

necessity. Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that

you may increase your perception. – Jallaludin Rumi

 

Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a

separate phase, executed by the hand. The hand surprises us,

creates and solves problems on its own. Often, enigmas that

baffle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the

hand. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

He who works with his hands is a laborer.

He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

He who works with his hands, his head and his heart is an artist.

--St. Francis of Assisi

 

Creative living, or the life of a creator, seems like a leap into the

unknown only because “normal life” is rigid and traumatized. –

Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in

which we continually test and demolish our own delusions;

therefore, it is sometimes painful. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

I no longer sought skill, flexibility, strength, endurance, muscle

tone, and quick responsiveness as means of imposing my will

on the instrument, but rather of keeping an open and

unrestricted pathway for the creative impulse to play its music

straight from the preconscious depths beneath and beyond me.

– Stephen Nachmanovich

 

All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.

-Joseph Conrad

 

If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build

cathedrals; if we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we

build ugly shopping malls. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

We learn to swim in winter, and skate in summer.

– William James

 

To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

– Chuang-Tzu

 

Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening,

looking—all require that we submit to being swept away by

Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when

we fall in love. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Noise ain’t nothin’ but a lonely note waitin’ for somethin’ to sing.

--Anonymous

 

With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much

judgement, we get blockage. – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal

your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply,

you break through into deeper layers of the collective

consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.

 – Stephen Nachmanovich

 

Where there is total absence of yourself, beauty is.

 –Krishnamurti

 

The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable, and articulate and complete.

--Wallace Stevens

 

If I could say it, I would not have to dance it. – Isadora Duncan

 

When the good student chooses the honest path, free of

perfectionism and faking, music study becomes something

refreshingly new: a calm oasis of self-acceptance for those who

are so used to driving themselves and trying to please others.

 –William Westney

 

Learning itself is a fulfilling adventure at all points in the

process. In fact, psychologists have listed learning as one of the

basic, universal joys of human experience. –William Westney

 

Music study presents a natural, here-and-now route to selfknowledge

and self-integration. – William Westney

 

Music, the most abstract and uncanny art, is an eternal river of

sound moving through time. We can free ourselves from

whatever may be holding us back, and join that flowing river.

 –William Westney

 

Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking

for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a

problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the

world in more than one way. – Twyla Tharpe

 

In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be

creative…..A lot of habitually creative people have preparation

rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their

day. By putting themselves into that environment, they begin

their creative day. – Twyla Tharpe

 

If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and

what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

–Twyla Tharpe

 

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything

is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. – Twyla Tharpe

 

Every day you don’t practice, you’re one day further from being

good. – Ben Holgen, golfer

 

Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to

entertain the uncomfortable. – Twyla Tharpe

 

There are as many forms of memory as there are ways of

perceiving, and every one of them is worth mining for

inspiration. - Twyla Tharpe

 

Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.

-Twyla Tharpe

 

You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little

ideas. - Twyla Tharpe

 

When inspiration does not come, I go halfway to meet it.

 –Sigmund Freud

 

That’s what improvising is like for me. There’s no tollbooth

between my impulse and my action. - Twyla Tharpe

 

Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heros, mentors,

nature—all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at

them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.

- Twyla Tharpe

 

Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.

 –E. B.White

 

The more I practice, the luckier I get. – Gary Player

 

80 % of success in show business is showing up. – Woody Allen

 

Where Love is deep, much can be accomplished.

– Shinichi Suzuki

 

To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for

ambiguity. - Twyla Tharpe

 

Regarding Louis Armstrong’s giant influence on Jazz, Dizzie

Gillespie said: “No him, No me.”

 

Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in

your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you

have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can

be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence.

- Twyla Tharpe

 

Pablo Picasso said, while admiring an exhibition of children’s

art: “When I was their age, I could draw like Raphael, but it has

taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

 

You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.

 -Twyla Tharpe

 

The one thing that creative souls around the world have in

common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills.

Art is a vast democracy of habit. - Twyla Tharpe

 

Because one has written other books does not mean the next

becomes any easier.- John Gregory Dunne

 

You double your intensity with skill.- Twyla Tharpe

 

The most important thing is not what the author or artist had in

mind to begin with, but at what point he decided to stop.

 – D. W. Harding

 

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were

yesterday is dead. – John Updike

 

The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public.

-Twyla Tharpe

 

Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Unil you’ve done it,

you’re missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.

 -Twyla Tharpe

 

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing is a field. I’ll

meet you there. – Rumi

 

If you paint for product, you have to follow the rules that keep

you on the track of your expectation. You have to calculate,

organize, plan every move. When you paint for process, you

listen to the magic of inner voices, you follow the basic human

urge to experiment with the new, the unknown, the mysterious,

the hidden. Process is adventure; product happens only within

the parameters designed. – Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

If you listen inside, the brush will want to run toward a color.

What you really need and want is very close, and the brush

goes to it quickly if you don’t think.

 - Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

Painting for process is the visual equivalent of journal writing,

done not for the sake of being seen or published, but purely for

the telling itself.- Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley       

 

It is extraordinary to see how the discovery of one single free

stroke of paint can fill you with such joy and amazement.

-Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

To discover that you can paint without special talent is a great

revelation. An endless stream runs through you, enough to

paint for lifetimes. Talent is universal. You can dip into that

source to your heart’s content. Everyone is good at what comes

to them spontaneously. If nothing is put in your way, talent will

meet you there. - Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for

things—they have to get along with one another.

– Pablo Picasso

 

To play is to listen to the imperative inner force that wants to

take form and be acted out without reason.

- Michell Cassou &Stewart Cubley

 

The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life

preservers around their necks, and more often than not, it is the

life preserver which sinks them. – Henry Miller

 

When we begin to lift the veils of censorship and repression in

painting, a great deal of energy is unleashed.

- Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

Forget safety.

Live where you fear to live.

Destroy your reputation.

Be notorious.

-Rumi

 

We have within us enormous reserves of trapped potential. Our

natural urges have been so constrained by the accommodations

of living that we each have a smoldering volcano just below the

surface. To enable this force to erupt in a healthy, open, and

positive manner is a momentous act.

 - Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

When you set aside the mantle of control in the painting

process, images arise from ancient layers of the psyche.

 -Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

Mysteries are not to be solved:

The eye goes blind

When it only wants to see why.

- Rumi

 

Look upon paintings with eyes of mystery rather than

judgement. Support the need to enter into the sacred space

beyond evaluation. - Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

You do not use art as a means to an end, but as a way to

inhabit and explore the present. Right and wrong fade away;

you recover your sense of what is authentic in you.

 - Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

Your art is part of the big painting of your life. You are on your

own, standing by yourself in the middle of creation. In the

beauty of that aloneness, and in how you respond to it, you will

find your passion. - Michell Cassou & Stewart Cubley

 

Music can shoot through the musician like lightening through

the sky if that music is unobstructed by thoughts.

– Kenny Werner

 

In many cases, the decision to study music has robbed them of

the ability to play music. They have lost respect for music that

comes from within because they have been programmed to feel

“unworthy”. – Kenny Werner

 

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the

painter do good things. – Edgar Degas

 

It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be

heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on

himself. We don’t need to hear who is more clever with

synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in,

which in many ways, we’re sorry about. – Keith Jarrett

 

Fear closes all doors to the true self, that brilliant center where

the ecstasy lies. – Kenny Werner

 

Just before I play, I like to feel that no-one has ever played the

piano before, that I’m in complete virgin territory, and that every

note I play is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.

– Kenny Werner

 

Patience is the absence of expectation. – Shinichi Suzuki

 

In fear, we expect; with love, we accept. – Kenny Werner

 

You must be nothing but an ear that hears what the universe of

the world is constantly saying within you.

 – Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezrich

 

Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one

would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible,

taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and

more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious

exisistences, the life of which, while ours passes away,

endures. - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the

reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out

its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to

yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to

write….Build your life according to this necessity; your life even

into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of

this urge and a testimony to it. . - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to

say what you see and experience and love and lose.

 - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the

belief in some sort of beauty—describe all these with loving,

quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things

in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the

objects of your memory. . - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then

take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, it’s burden and it’s

greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come

from outside.  - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

There is nothing that does not seem to have been understood,

grasped, experienced and recognized in the tremulous after-ring

of memory; no experience has been to slight, and the least

incident unfolds like a destiny, and fate itself is like a

wonderful, wide web in which each thread is guided by an

infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another and held and

borne up by a hundred others. . - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so

little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and

hold and be just toward them. - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each

impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion

wholly in itself, in the dark of the inexpressible, the

unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence…. and

wait with deep humility and patience for the birth-hour of a new

clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as

in creating. - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten

years are nothing. Being an artist  means not reckoning and

counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force it’s sap

and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear

that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it

comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay

before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily,

learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little

things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly

become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of

inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who

serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then

everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow

more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which

lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness….

-Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to

love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books

that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the

answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be

able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the

questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without

noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love

revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Do not be bewildered by surfaces; in the depths all becomes

law. - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under

profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is

just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of

happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all

status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands

in the midst of sheer life. - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so

loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is—solitude,

intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

- RainerMaria Rilke

 

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge

reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our

divining perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater

confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when

something new has entered into us, something unknown; our

feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us

withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one

knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us.

Has its terrors, they are our terrors ;it has its abysses, those

abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love

them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle

which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult,

then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become

what we most trust and find most faithful. - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at

the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at

the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of

our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once

beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in it’s

deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

 -Rainer Maria Rilke

 

I never call myself modern or traditional, in our out, new or

used, because I prefer not to be hemmed in by rigid definitions.

– Kenny Werner

 

Intellect has to surrender to instinct when it is time to play.

 –Kenny Werner

 

Mastery is playing whatever you’re capable of playing—every

time—WITHOUT THINKING. Kenny Werner

 

If one’s life depends on doing something right, as in the case of

the tightrope walker, one will practice on a much deeper level.

 Kenny Werner

 

It is good to view things as familiar or unfamiliar, rather than as

difficult or easy. – Kenny Werner

 

Bill Evans described his tunes as vehicles; they are vehicles for

self-expression, or expression of the self. – Kenny Werner

 

As  the brush is doing what it’s doing, it will stumble on what one

couldn’t do by oneself. – Robert Motherwell

 

The music for this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me

by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and

communicating it to the public. – Giacomo Puccini

 

Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God. –

Johannes Brahms

 

Every blade of grass has it’s angel that bends over it and

whispers, “Grow, grow.” –The Talmud

 

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters,

compared to what lies within us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough

and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. – May Sarton

 

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a

kaleidoscope of new possibilities.

– Jean Houston

 

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the

intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.

The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. – Carl G. Jung

 

During these periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual

activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce

the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and

delight. – Fritjof Capra, Physicist

 

Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so smalland it takes time. We

haven’t time—and so to see takes time, like to have a friend

takes time. – Georgia O’Keefe

 

So you see, imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient,

happy idling, dawdling and puttering. – Brenda Ueland

 

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. –

Oscar Wilde

 

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two

chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are

transformed. – Carl G. Jung

 

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve

imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe

will be simpler. – Henry David Thoreau

 

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to

what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept

your soul alive. – Robert Louis Stevenson

 

The painting has a life of it’s own. I try to let it come through.

 –Jackson Pollack

 

I shut my eyes in order to see. – Paul Gaugin

 

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.

– Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

 

Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance

favors only the prepared mind. – Louis Pasteur

 

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in

the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish. – Ovid

 

Stop thinking and talking about it, and there will be nothing you

will not be able to know. – Zen paradigm

 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. – Theodore Roethke

 

When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an

image of the experience out before her and enters into her won

image. – Meister Eckhart

 

Look and you will find it—what is unsought will go undetected.

– Sophocles

 

It is in my power either to serve God or not to serve him.

Serving him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole

world. Not serving him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the

world of that good, which was in my power to create.

– LeoTolstoy

 

You build up a head of steam. If you’re four days out of the

studio, on the fifth day you really crash in there. You will kill

anybody who disturbs you on that fifth day, when you

desperately need it. – Susan Rothenberg

 

True life is lived when tiny changes occur. – Leo Tolstoy

 

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or

how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The

artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but

we take leap after leap in the dark. – Agnes de Mille

 

There is no must in art because art is free.

 – Wassily Kandinsky

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the

conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

 – Fernando Botero

 

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears

outside as fate. – Carl G. Jung

 

Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear

most. – Fyodor Dostoyevski

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein

 

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with

the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

– Paul Cezanne

 

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are

made. Destiny is made known silently. – Agnes de Mille

 

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not

exist. – Rene-Francois-Ghislain Magritte

 

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

 – Anaiis Nin

 

Learning is movement from moment to moment.

– J. Krishnamurti

 

If we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives

are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that

determines the kind of men we are. – Cesar Chavez

 

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. – Jalal ud-Din Rumi

 

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who

want something else more than truth. – Adrienne Rich

 

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has

ceased. – J. Krishnamurti

 

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

– Francis Bacon

 

Art happens—no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on

it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

 – James Abbot McNeill Whistler

 

You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.

–Juan Gris

 

No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity

with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a

source I never dreamt existed.

 – Roger Bannister, on breaking the four minute mile

 

Adventures never begins until you get into the forest. That first

step is an act of faith. – Micky Hart, Grateful Dead drummer

 

Do not fear mistakes-there are none. – Miles Davis

 

What shakes the eye, but the invisible? – Theodore Roethke

 

Play is the exultation of the possible.- Martin Buber

 

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we

shall learn nothing. – Henry Miller

 

It is impossible to be self-conscious and totally involved in the

music at the same time. Consciousness of the self is a barrier

between the player and the instrument. As I forget my own

presence, I attain a state of oneness with the activity and

become absorbed in a way that defies the passage of time. –

Mildred Chase (from Just being at the Piano)

 

…Their minstrels play music from within; and whole oceans of

passion foam on the crest of the waves. –Rumi Jallaludin

 

If you forget yourself, you become the universe.

-Hakuin Ortegama

 

The harp gives forth murmurous music; and the dance goes on

without hands and feet. It is played without fingers, it is heard

without ears; for He is the ear; and He is the listener. – Kabir

 

To play the piano is to consort with nature. Every mollusk,

galaxy, vapor or viper as well the sweet incense of love’s

distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist.

–Russell Sherman

 

To know the piano is to know the universe. To master the piano

is to master the universe. The spectrum of piano sound acts as

a prism through which all musical and non-musical sounds may

be filtered. The grunts of sheep, the braying of mules, the

popping of champagne corks, the sighs of unrequited love, not

to mention the full lexicon of sounds available to all other

instruments—including whistles, scrapes, bleatings, caresses,

thuds, hoots, plus sweet and sour pluckings—fall within the

sovereignty of this most bare and dissembling chameleon.

 –Russell Sherman

 

The breath, prayers, and libido of the fingertip must somehow

be transferred to the neutral indifference of the key.

 – Russell Sherman

 

Brilliant students have brilliant parents, of the kind that shine

forth in their devotion. Something different from vague hopes or

strident ambition is involved. It is, rather, devotion to a kind of

aesthetic and spiritual ideal which may be nameless, inchoate,

even beyond the family experience or articulation. But it is

passionately felt and communicated. More than a dream of

glory, it comes closer to some conception of a paradise in which

beauty and justice are permanently bound and enshrined. For

these parents the leap of faith is rooted and pervasive. Heaven

exists, is enchanted, and will be known through the diligence

and sounds of their children. – Russell Sherman

 

A nation will prosper to the degree that it honors it’s teachers.

 –Plato

 

Practice in tranquility. – Artur Schnabel

 

Surely common sense as well as anthropological evidence

documents the universal need to pray, to hope, and to lament or

carouse through song. – Russell Sherman

 

The context for music is varied and profound. If their fantasy is

to be awakened—so that their sounds may be incisive or

ravishing—then the menagerie of saints and dragons must be

faithfully recalled. – Russell Sherman

 

My artistic mission is to send light into the depths of the human

heart. – Robert Schumann

 

The work of art, though bound by its genetic markings and

indelible fingerprints, is boundless in the infinite elaborations of

its destiny, and therefore in the range of its interpretations. –

Russell Sherman

 

As Bartok put it so succinctly: ”Competitions are for horses.”

Nothing could be more barbaric that the practice or ranking

artists as though they were divers or figure skaters….What one

suspects is that the appetite for dividing the world into winners

and losers, anointed and anonymous, is so compulsive that it

feeds with special, vindictive hunger on the most elusive and

ephemeral of subjects. For if music can be reduced to games of

power and success, then innocence—love without profit—can be

dealt a crushing blow. – Russell Sherman

 

The music of the supreme architect, Bach, is filled with pages of

discursive argument and rumination, glorifying the nameless

whole by a rich embroidery of passages which lead everywhere

and nowhere. The ideas are presented, stood on their head,

dissolved into fragments, until the ultimate message becomes

the connections of all things great and small, a chain of being

which cannot be secured until the last note is in place.

– Russell Sherman

 

There are two indices of genuine art: it is inimitable and it is

ineffable. – Pierre Auguste Renoir

 

As artists, are we quasi psychiatrists who mend the soul? Do

we provide the consolations, escapes, and reassurances which

enable us to survive? Or are we reporters of the truth,

assembling the multiple shards of reality into intricate portraits

which seek out the connections between misery and blessing,

violence and wisdom? Do we protect or investigate the heart?

 –Russell Sherman

 

Without silence there is no music. Not simply because the

faculty of hearing deteriorates from constant exposure to noise,

but because silence is both the majestic frame and the stable

solution for musical (and poetic) ideas. Silence is the soda

water, the bracing ether, the bridge and mode of respect for

receiving instructions from the angel. – Russell Sherman

 

When we play music we describe the echo the tableau of

natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by

the composer’s imagination, which yet must be filtered through

our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this

tableau, this revelation, we must “hesitate”, we must doubt, as

the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred

by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the

construction of being. – Russell Sherman

 

Art is a process of concentration. It is both the distilled essence

and the commentary upon otherwise mundane activities and

reflections. Musical notes must be charged, must gather more

than one and the surface meaning, must reveal audible and

“inaudible” connections to other notes, patterns, and meaning,

either by way of affinity or contrast. – Russell Sherman

 

A work of art expresses itself as a balance sheet pitting the

spoken against the unspoken. – Russell Sherman

 

All musical phrases have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Of

course some of them seem oddly undomesticated, apparently

beginning in the middle, and ending where they should begin.

That is, they may begin with an unbridled energy or finish in

way more searching than placid. The variables that determine

the destiny of the phrase—be they functions of line, rhythm,

harmony, counterpoint—do not always behave as anticipated.

They do not always conform to the design of the cherished

Roman arch, bereft of swerving, branching, or unwanted ivy.

Phrases contain seeds of growth development, and destruction;

their tendency to soaring parabolas is sometimes affected by

poignant contingencies and detours. – Russell Sherman

 

The contradictory, consuming, contested relationship between

detail and whole, event an eventuality, breathes fire and

wisdom in every great work of art. – Russell Sherman

 

Through music time is tamed, although music never forgets to

remind us of time’s faceless mission. – Russell Sherman

 

For time not only moves inexorable forward, as the underlying

grid to our personal chronicle, but is manipulated by our psychic

needs and natures into various images of timelessness and

timeliness. Transient moments suddenly expand, visions of

infinity intervene, notes and phrases become outlets of fantasy,

escape, recollection, or omen. The music travels on two planes,

chronological time and psychological time. Both planes are

essential and must be abundantly represented.

– Russell Sherman

 

The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic

music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation;

for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which

brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was

there to behold them. – Richard Wagner

 

The language of notes, or musical sounds belongs equally to all

mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the

musician speaks to every heart. –Richard Wagner

 

Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of

the soul, imparting grace and beauty to the soul. –Plato

 

In very ancient times of human evolution upon earth,

humanity’s revelation in word and sound was not differentiated

in song and speech, but they were one. –Rudolf Steiner

 

When the human being sings, he lends expression to the great

wise ways in which the world was made. –Rudolf Steiner

 

These revelations expressed through Art work upon the soul

with a force carrying its own conviction and permeate our

sentient life with a sense of truth which logic and mere reason

are powerless to combat. – Richard Wagner

 

The man who hath music in his soul will be most in love with

the loveliest. –Plato

 

Sounds arise in the heart. – Old Chinese Proverb

 

Music is the real universal speech of mankind. – C. F. Weber

 

Music is a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which

leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment

gaze into that. – Carlyle

 

Music is there, in eternal and inaudible beauty, and we speak

of this inaudible beauty as the harmony of the spheres.

Sometimes, in the moment of waking out of a sleep we can feel

ourselves streaming earthwards in a river of light and of great

organ tones- a magnificent and indescribable harmony come

with us, “trailing clouds of glory”. Then suddenly we are

awake, and it is silent. – Elanor Merry, “The Flaming Door”

 

A therapy which has as a goal the freeing and development of

the individual within the universal worlds of human principles

is more effective and realistic than one that aims to normalize.

Universal values transcend the limited values of any one

nationality or culture. Universal values can live in music. This is

why music is so important in the lives of handicapped children.

– Clive Robbins

 

Sound seems to be nothing but broken movement in the sense

that colour is broken light. – Novalis

 

There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes from

music. – Robert Browning

 

I have increasingly become conversant with Pythagoras’ and

Goethe’s idea of a primordial music, not perceptible to the

sensuous ear, but sounding and soaring throughout the cosmos.

Tracing it to such exalted origins, I begin to understand more

deeply the essence of our art and its elemental power over the

human soul. Man, being a creature of Nature and subject to the

cosmic influences that inform all earthly beings, must needs

have been under the sway of that music from his earliest days;

his organism reverberated with its vibrations and received it’s

rhythmic impulses. – Bruno Walter

 

Is not musical education of paramount importance for those

reasons, because rhythm and harmony enter most powerfully

into the innermost part of the soul and lay forcible hands upon

it, bearing grace with them, so making graceful him who is

rightly trained, and him who is not, the reverse? – Plato

 

The child is telling us in a hundred different ways that he longs

for art, Music and Rhythm, and if we fail him he will fill in the

gap as well as he can for himself, for to him it means the life or

death of the soul. –John Benians

 

We create the possibility for a better human form in our next life

if during our jamaloca existence after death, when we still have

an astral body, we can have memories connected with music. –

Rudolf Steiner

 

Emotions of any kind are produced by melody and rhythm;

therefore by music a man becomes accustomed to feeling the

right emotions; music has thus the power to form character, and

the various kinds of music based on various modes may be

distinguished by their effects on character. – Aristotle

Music is so elevated that it is beyond the reach of intellect and

there flows from it an influence which is all-potent, and which

noone can explain. – Goethe

 

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws which would

have lain concealed forever had she not appeared. – Goethe

 

Ask not what your teammates can do for you, ask what you can

do for your teammates. – Magic Johnson

 

Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to it’s

original dimensions. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness,

the only real religion. – Isreael Zangwill

 

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs

us and the light goes out. – James Baldwin

 

If he works for you, you work for him. – Japanese proverb

 

Life only demands from you the strength that you possess.

Only one feat is possible: not to have run away.

– Dag Hammarskjold

 

Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in

playing a poor hand well. – Denis Waitley and Rem L. Witt

 

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their

dreams. – Eleanor Roosevelt

 

The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in

the world. – Lao Tzu

 

If at first you don’t succeed, you’re running about average. –

M.H. Alderson

 

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

– Samuel Johnson

 

The only place where success comes before work is in the

dictionary. – Vidal Sassoon

 

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult

problem. – Henry Kissinger

 

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the more I work, the more

I have of it. – Thomas Jefferson

 

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

–      Fancis Bacon

–       

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

– Joseph Campbell

 

Character is destiny. – Heraclitus

 

You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money

You’ve got to love like you’ll never get hurt

You’ve got to dance like there’s nobody watching

You’ve got to come from the heart if you want it to work.

-Susanna Clark

 

Being on the tightrope is living. Everything else is waiting.

 –Karl Wallenda

 

You become a winner only if you are willing to walk over the

edge. - Damon Runyon

 

Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require

a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative

change in our lives. – Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Teaching English is an intrinsically radical act. Is it possible to

teach English so that people stop killing each other?

 – Mary Rose O’Reilley

 

Keep thy heart in all diligence, forout of it are the issues of life. –

Proverbs 4:23

 

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

–      Eudora Welty

–       

Unless you feel it , you will never achieve it.

If it doesn’t flow from your soul

With natural, easy power,

Your listeners will not believe it.

-Goethe(Faust)

 

Resist doing things that have no meaning for life. – Pablo Casals

 

But finding a voice-let’s be clear-is a political act. It defines a

moment of presence, of being awake; and it involves not only

self-understanding, but the ability to transmit that selfunderstanding

to others…To experience yourself as “voiceless”

is a definition of depression, subjugation, and being counted

out. . – Mary Rose O’Reilley

 

A language that takes our emotions seriously and gives them

real weight in our lives encourages us to think and be and act

differently. – Dorothee Soelle

 

Finding voice is a socially responsible political act. We don’t

just do it for ourselves. And helping someone to find voice

demands a spiritual partnership with that seeker. It’s an

exercise of compassion. – Mary Rose O’ Reilley

 

We must continue in the face of tremendous opposition. No one

is encouraging us to open, and still we must peel away the

layers of the heart. – Chogyam Trungpa

 

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it

announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is

not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an

abnormaland unacceptable condition for humanness.

 – Walter Brueggemann

 

Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal

numbness in which most of us exist. – Walter Brueggemann

 

If you have a big splash of ecstasy in your life every day you

are going to teach students something finer than “buy low/sell

high”. Maybe you’ll teach them, not by what you say but by

who you are, to live their lives as a standing affront to the

ravaging mercantile mentality. – Mary Rose O’ Reilley

 

What do you do for ecstasy? – Mary Rose O’ Reilley

 

The economy of gift, of art, is fundamentally opposed to the

economy of war. – Mary Rose O’ Reilley

 

What if we were to take seriously the possibility that our

students have a rich and authoritative inner life and tried to

nourish it rather than negate it? – Mary Rose O’ Reilley

 

The bud

Stands for all things

Even for those things that don’t flower,

For everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

Thought sometimes it is necessary

To reteach a thing it’s loveliness

-Galway Kinnell

 

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in

their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and

life alike. – Margot Fonteyn

 

We create ourselves by our choices. – Kierkegaard

 

In a lethal world, poetry is necessary for survival.

– M. C. Richards

 

There must be a mirror to show the soul to itself before the soul

can begin to gather its courage. – Mary Rose O’ Reilley

 

In painting, you can suddenly come upon something so huge

that no-one can deal with it. – Balzac

 

It is not society which is to guide and save the creative hero, but

precisely the reverse. – Joseph Campbell

 

The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light

again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated Soul.

– Joseph Campbell

 

The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount

Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory

of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the

mirror, but the King within. – Joseph Campbell

 

Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from

the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal

deep and back--not contaminating the principles of the one with

those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by

virtue of the other--is the talent of the master.

– Joseph Campbell

 

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in

a myth or the dreamer of a dream discovers and assimilates his

opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or

by being swallowed. – Joseph Campbell

 

The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground,

incidentally; fundamentally it is inward---into depths where

obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten

powers are revivified, to be made available for the

transfiguration of the world. – Joseph Campbell

 

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for

the heros of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is

thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the

hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination,

we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we

shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward,

we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had

thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

 – Joseph Campbell

 

We sing with the entire body. The sounds that we make

emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and

soul, and, most important, the gut. – Renee Fleming

 

While it’s a fact that a voice begins with natural talent, any

talent must be nurtured, cajoled, wrestled with pampered,

challenged, and, at every turn, examined. – Renee Fleming

 

Music was language in our house. It was air…..I feel certain

that if I absorbed any lessons at all in the first months and

years of my life, they must have been about the work that went

into making a beautiful sound. – Renee Fleming

 

Fostering creativity in children is as important as any other part

of the school curriculum because it feeds the soul. A daily dose

of creativity helps children imagine a better world and then

create it. – Renee Fleming

 

It was when I started writing music rather than just performing

it that I first began to develop a sense of who I was as a

person. – Renee Fleming

 

I have a noble history of being rejected by a lot of places, only to

discover that the one that finally lets me in is in fact the perfect

fit. – Renee Fleming

 

In my current rehearsal days, murder, rape, sobs, and

vengeance often follow a coffee break. One has to swallow and

simply take the plunge, embracing the dramatic, emotional

language of opera. – Renee Fleming

 

Someone once said that there are probably seven naturally

good singing days in a year—and those are days you won’t be

booked. What we must learn is how to sing through all the

other days. – Renee Fleming

 

Singers can also get away with a lot based on youth, strength

and enthusiasm, only to find ten years later that what was

once just a niggling problem has brought their careers to an

end. – Renee Fleming

 

Among the important realizations I had in my own days in the

practice room was that if any one route to any one phrase didn’t

work after days of trying, then the exact opposite route should

at least be explored, as well as every alternative in between, as

counterintuitive as that often seemed. – Renee Fleming

 

The student’s job is to stay open-minded, to quell the knee-jerk

defensiveness we all possess in the face of suggestions for

improvement, and to maintain patience when faced with a

process that is often slow, confusing, and frustrating.

– Renee Fleming

 

You finally have to learn to pull all the different kinds of

teaching and training and coaching together on you own, so

that your voice and body and technique for a sound that is

consistent and solid. – Renee Fleming

 

So much can be gained from watching other singers, seeing

what they do and what they don’t do, seeing how they look

when they breathe, how wide they open their mouths for a high

note. – Renee Fleming

 

An interpretation exists because of what we find between the

notes. – Renee Fleming

 

It is our responsibility to learn how to speak to an audience that

is less informed about music, to give it a reason to want to come

and see us instead of going to the movies. – Renee Fleming

 

If I have to hold a note for a long time, I imagine it as moving

and spinning, for the note has to have life. In a way, a singer

actually refreshes a note with every beat that it’s held.

 – Renee Fleming

 

In a sense, it’s less about seeing how high up I can vault than

about seeing how deeply I can explore my potential...Ambition

for me is about the willingness to work, the ability to mine my

own soul fearlessly. – Renee Fleming

 

It’s the constant re-working of technique every day that fosters

longevity. – Renee Fleming

 

The reason that some singers go on to become great artists has

very little to do with their voices, but rather with the fact that

they have used their instruments as tools for detailed

communication. – Renee Fleming

 

Perfection often creates such a flawless surface that there’s no

place for the audience to enter into a piece, while the

idiosyncrasies of individual style are like windows into the

singer’s heart. – Renee Fleming

 

Part of why we watch these performers with such passionate

intensity is the same reason we can’t tear our eyes away from

the girl on the high wire or the man with his head in the lion’s

mouth: the thrill that comes from witnessing someone taking

chances. – Renee Fleming

 

The more you put into it, the more you and the audience will get

out of it. – Renee Fleming

 

Nothing but the expressive gamut will do. – William Christie

 

In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic

sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and

conviction every month. – Renee Fleming

 

Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same

time. -Leonard Bernstein

 

Music enabled me as a fragile young person to give voice to

emotions I could barely name, and how it enables me to give my

voice the unique and mysterious power to speak to others.

 –Renee Fleming

 

We are unique, each human voice, not because we are

completely self-generated, but because of who we choose to

assemble the countless factors that made us. – Renee Fleming

I would have to talk for a year to repeat a single on of my works

with words. – August Rodin

 

He who understands one thing understands everything, for the

same laws are in all. – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an

immense arc, and made it a part of nature. – Rainer Maria Rilke

 

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been

hidden by the answers. –James Baldwin

 

Physics is a form of insight and as such it’s a form of art.

–      David Bohm

 

There are two kinds of artists—revolutionaries and plagaiarists.

– Paul Gauguin

 

Admixing the inner space of dream, trance, and myth with the

events of everyday existence characterized every belief system

worldwide before the Greeks…..time meandered back and forth

between reality and myth. – Leonard Schlain

 

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not work

the humble reasoning of a single individual. – Galileo

 

Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge of all

the generations of the world. – Leonardo da Vinci

 

Using both brush and pen, Leonardo changed the way we see

the workld and this subtle shift in mind-set prepared people to

be receptive when Newton introduced a new way to think about

the world. – Leonard Schlain

 

Art degraded, Imagination denied. – William Blake

 

Every man who is not an artist is a traitor to his own nature.

 –William Blake

 

Great art can communicate before it is understood. – T. S. Eliot

 

The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the

future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the

present. – Wyndham Lewis

 

A minute in the world’s life passes! To paint it in its reality, and

forget everything for that! To become that minute, to be the

sensitive plate… five the image of what we see, forgetting

everything that has appeared before our time…..- Paul Cezanne

 

If we do not expect the unexpected, we will never find it.

–Heraclitus

 

Nature wants children to be children before men…Childhood

has its own seeing , thinking and feeling.

 – Jean Jacques Rousseau

 

There are children playing in the street who could solve some of

my top problems in physics, because they have modes of

sensory perception that I lost long ago. – J. Robert Oppenheimer

 

I am the primitive of the way I have discovered. – Paul Cezanne

 

A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the

universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by brining a new

form into it. – Henri Matisse

 

Nature is more depth than surface, the colours are the

expressions on the surface of this depth; they rise up from the

roots of the world. – Paul Cezanne

 

The real subject of every painting is light. – Claude Monet

 

For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is.

 – Albert Einstein

 

Noone has ever been able to define or synthesize that

precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the

creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the

artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the

right to create even though he may not always know what he is

doing. – Norman Cousins

 

Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.

 – Rene Magritte

 

(James) Levine and I have talked about the difference between

a performance upon which interpretive elements are placed and

a performance in which these elements are relayed to the

audience in a way that feels natural and organic. He said the

goal was for the personality to be completely present but not

self-conscious. – Renee Fleming

 

Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams,

in the undirected play of thought. –Andre Breton

 

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another

one; in this way, every man is two men. – Jorge Luis Borges

 

Our western mind lacking all culture in this respect, has never

yet devised a concept, not even a name for “the union of

opposites through the middle path”, that most fundamental item

of inward experience which could respectably be set against the

Chinese concept of Tao. – Carl Jung

 

I’m in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on

its ass in a museum. – Claes Oldenberg

 

There is nothing in the world except empty curved space,

Matter, charge, electromagnetism and other fields are only

manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry.

 –John Archibald Wheeler

 

Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a

humanlanguage by which we can speak about the more remote

parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the

different styles of art are different words or groups of words in

this language. – Werner Heisenberg

 

After this, we will all have to live a little differently.

– Rainer Maria Rilke (upon seeing Canstantin Brancusi’s 1919 sculpture

“Bird in Space”)

 

More primordial than any idea, beauty will be manifest as the

herald and generator or ideas. – Teilhard de Chardin

 

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who

grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in

his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

– Marshall McLuhan

 

Revolutionary art anticipates visionary physics. When the

vision of the revolutionary artist, rooted in the Dionysian right

hemisphere, combines with precognition, art will prophesy the

future conception of reality. – Leonard Schlain, Art and Physics

 

In the future, people will be able, and must be able to enter so

deeply into physical sound with their own inner musicality that

their immanent musical nature once more communes with the

Music of the Spheres. –Heiner Ruland

 

Intellectualist education stifle fantasy and breeds people who

later in life become lonely and are continually confronted with

their inability to make real contact with other people.

 –Lievegood

 

I have a dream! – Dr. Martin Luther King

 

And what does every child believe every adult capable of doing?

Of actually being able to bend the world to an inner desire,

exactly what the child is busily practicing in his passionate

play. – Joseph Chilton Pearce

 

When hearing gives way to listening, one’s awareness

increases. The will is aroused and all aspects of the being are

involved at the same time. – Alfred Tomatis

 

The modern closed circle of twelve tones, which has become the

usual temperament since the time of J. S. Bach is more than

merely an artifice of the piano tuners, It is the result of an inner

musical reality that reflects the constitution and consciousness

of modern humanity. – Heiner Ruland

 

Whenever the human spirit creates culture, nature is tempered,

musically. – Michael Deeson Barrow

 

The music of children should have as much life as the art of

children. – Michael Deeson Barrow

 

Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the

current of our thoughts; the very undertow of our life’s stream. –

Henry David Thoreau

 

Yearning for truth and beauty is at the root of genius as well as

being one of the secrets in the development of humankind.

–Alice Kanack

 

Zen is practice! – Suzuki Roshi

 

Our job is to listen to and hear the music of children, for here is

the music of our future. – Michael Deeson Barrow

 

The artist is the antennae of the race. – Ezra Pound

 

Without music, life would be a mistake.- Friedrich Neitzche

 

Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and

keep order in it. – Igor Stravinsky

 

Be yourself.  Everyone else is already taken. –Oscar Wilde