bookshelf

"It's worth noting how rarely myths describe music originating as entertainment or works of artistic expression."

"Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord."

"What a man calls beauty is the harmony of all he experiences."

"One way not to [listen to it] is to focus on the notes and stuff like that. Instead, try to move your imagination toward the sound. It's a matter of following the sound... follow the sound, the pictures, the colours. You have to watch them move."

"Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful."

"Happiness is wild and arbitrary, but it's not sudden."

"Whoever must play, cannot play."

"Art sets truth to work."

"Art sets truth to work."

"...the thinkers whose insight withstood the test of time, from Socrates to Husserl, were of a different breed. They were the perennial beginners, taking the sense of lived experience in its primordial immediacy for their subject matter. Their stance was one of wonder, not of sophistication; the task they undertook was one of articulation—and their virtue was naivete, a willingness to see before theorizing, to encounter the wonder of being rather than enclose themselves in cunningly devised theories."

"It is, surely, good that there are synthetic medicines to ease the surplus of pain, telephones to break through loneliness, and electric lights to keep the wayfarer from stumbling. There is, though, something wrong when we use medicine to deaden our sensitivity, when we obliterate solitude with electronics and blind ourselves with the very lights we devised to help us see."

"[John Coltrane] felt that music was like the universe, which influenced me. You look up and see the stars but beyond them are many other stars. He was looking for the stars you can't see."

"As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language."

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"I am certain, first, that to take part in a music act is of central importance to our very humanness, as important as taking part in the act of speech... and second, that everyone, every normally endowed human being, is born with the gift of music no less than with the gift of speech. If that is so, then our present-day concert life, whether 'classical' or 'popular,' in which the 'talented' few are empowered to produce music for the 'untalented' majority, is based on a falsehood. It means that our powers of making music for ourselves have been hijacked and the majority of people robbed of the musicality that is theirs by right of birth, while a few stars, and their handlers, grow rich and famous through selling us what we have been led to believe we lack."

"Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable."

"From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own."

"Understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action."

"People need to speak, look, smell, touch, experience vocal tone, facial expression, make jokes, sit back, shift gears, and evolve their ideas and feelings in front of each other in order to produce meaning. They need to eat together."

"Meanwhile, the winds will keep blowing away our beautiful care. That's okay. That's as it should be. Most of what is wildly worthwhile is achingly impermanent."

"They are like solitary people. Not hermits who’ve stolen away from society out of some weakness, but great, lonely people, like Beethoven or Nietzsche. The world rustles in their uppermost branches, their roots rest in the infinite, but they do not lose themselves in either, they work with all the strength of their lives toward just one thing: fulfilling their own law that lives within them, shaping their own form, becoming their own selves. Nothing is more sacred, nothing more exemplary, than a strong and beautiful tree."

"If you're consistently two or three times more focused in each moment of life, then you're living two or three times bigger, two or three times richer."

"If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived."

"Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one's pupils: 'Now you must pay attention,' one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles."