Popular quotes about Classical! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
It seemed to me that had Haydn lived to our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time. That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the classical style. And when I saw that my idea was beginning to work, I called it the Classical Symphony.
Sergei ProkofievWhy is it that beautiful women never seem to have curiosity? Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces.
Penelope GilliattI would say that the most complex style of singing comes from India. Real, classical Indian music produces probably the best technical and natural singers in the world, just because the patterns and the inflection are so complex in how the style moves and what it requires vocally. I think the best classical singers come from India.
MiguelI studied classical percussion for ten years. At one point I was thinking about going to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, but then I realized it's actually not what I wanted to do.
Alycia Debnam CareyAl-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.
Peter AdamsonJazz is an endless source of ideas, because you can use anything. You can play operatic arias. You can incorporate them into jazz. You can play gypsy music and incorporate it into jazz. You can European classical and you can incorporate it into jazz. You can use anything and jazz it up, as they used to say.
Sonny RollinsI got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.
Gary OldmanThe psychology of the saver and the psychology of the investor is very closely connected with Keynes' distinction between risk and uncertainty. When the future is uncertain, he thought that a lot of saving would be directed towards securing, securing more, getting more security in the present, rather than building wealth in the future, which was the classical view, you save in order to invest, in order to consume more later on. What he had called the propensity to hoard or liquidity preference would normally be stronger than the inducement to invest.
Robert Skidelsky, Baron SkidelskyWhen I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.
Dave BrubeckAs for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.
Victor HugoThe analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.
Gerald EdelmanWith a piece of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, on first listening I'm referencing it with other pieces by them that I know. I think that most people do this - they listen to pieces through the filter of pieces they already know.
Paul LanskyI wasn't listening to that much classical music - not much more than anything else. I was really lucky to have parents who loved all kinds of music.
Cecile McLorin SalvantClassical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
Cyril ConnollyClassical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.
Michael Tilson ThomasThe road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women.
Gloria SteinemThe classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
Imre Lakatos... liberal intellectualstend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping thatthose in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the "establishment.
Susan SontagI think Bond the character is distinct: He's British, he has a certain code that he lives by, he's incorruptible... he's a classical hero, but he's also fallible. He has inner demons, inner conflicts, and he's a romantic.
Barbara BroccoliHip-hop has a feeling element, it's not just about knowing music. It's not like classical music or jazz where you can go on raw energy.
Robert GreeneHis wardrobe was extensive-very extensive-not strictly classical perhaps, not quite new, nor did it contain any one garment made precisely after the fashion of any age or time, but everything was more or less spangled; and what can be prettier than spangles!
Charles DickensIndian classical dance is sustained by a profound philosophy. Form seeks to merge with the formless, motions seek to become a part of the motionless, and the dancing individual seeks to become one with the eternal dance of the cosmos.
Nita AmbaniWe are used to discounting the river-gods and dryads of the Greeks as poetical fancies, and even the chief figures in the classical Pantheon-Venus, Minerva, Mars, and the rest-as allegories. But, forgetting that they once carried as much sanctity as our saints and divinities, we refrain from applying the same reasoning to our own objects of worship.
Julian HuxleyOn horseback you feel as if you're moving in time to classical music; a camel seems to progress to the beat of a drum played by a drunk.
Walter MoersMy influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.
Rokia TraoreI grew up in a theater family. My father was a regional theater classical repertory producer. He created Shakespeare festivals. He produced all of Shakespeare's plays, mostly in Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. One of them, the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, is still going. So I grew up not wanting to be an actor, not wanting to go into the family business.
John LithgowWe need to send Barack Obama back to Chicago. I'd like to send him back to Kenya, back to Indonesia. We have to unmask this man. This is a man that seeks to destroy all concept of God. And I will tell you what, this is classical Marxist philosophy.
Rafael CruzThe pseudoscience of astrology has no place in magick. Astrology has already died twice: once with the classical gods, and a second time after the Enlightenment. The complete failure of contemporary psychology to create anything other than a vocabulary of intellectual rubbish has encouraged astrology to resurface.
Peter J. CarrollA hard-fought, well-fought, hairline-close game is as classical in sports as tragedy is in the theater. Victory is contained within defeat, and defeat is contained within victory. That's the way it is in the best of games. What counts in sports is not the victory, but the magnificence of the struggle.
Joe PaternoFrom the heaviest of the heavy to classical to country, that's what I listen to, I listen to a variety and I enjoy good music, good songs.
Tom ArayaIn some ways, it is difficult for contemporary composers to find an audience. Both men and women would love a culture that embraced and hungered for new music, as they did in the Classical period. I tell my students that they should just keep writing, write what pleases you, and don't worry about what people or critics may think about your music.
Barbara HarbachThe period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind. . . . The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and classical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.
William Edward Hartpole LeckyI should dread to disfigure the beautiful ideal of the memories of illustrious persons with incongruous features, and to sully the imaginative purity of classical works with gross and trivial recollections.
William WordsworthCulture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building -- like Tower Bridge -- or a classical front put on a steel frame -- like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living -- not something added, like sugar on a pill.
Eric GillNormally classical music is set up so you have professionals on a stage and a bunch of audience - it's us versus them. You spend your entire time as an audience member looking at the back of the conductor so you're already aware of a certain kind of hierarchy when you are there: there are people who can do it, who are on stage, and you aren't on stage so you can't do it. There's also a conductor who is telling the people who are onstage exactly what to do and when to do it and so you know that person is more important than the people on stage.
David LangJazz isn't like pop, where you sell millions of records with a hit. Your spirit and soul aren't important in pop music. But jazz is like classical music. If people like you, they'll remember you and you'll last forever.
Freddie HubbardMost of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books.
Ralph Waldo EmersonIndeed, I find it illuminating to consider to what extent our "classical conditions" for economic growth are satisfied in the current, monopolistic phase of capitalism.
Paul A. BaranI still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since then has just been repetition. A lot of it is marvelous but the forms haven't changed.
Pankaj MishraThe unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."
Carl JungBob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.
Allen GinsbergClassical virtuosity is more than technique, line, proportion, and balance. It is as if the performer and spectator come together to hold in their hands a bird with a broken wing. The creature can be felt to stir, to struggle for freedom. Its life responds to human warmth; its wing might brush your check as it flies away.
Gelsey Kirkland