Great Throughts Treasury

"Music can name the unnamable, and communicate the unknowable."

"Einstein said that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” then why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus apparently depriving it of its mystery?"

"(It was) an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn, that was revealed to me by my (Boston Latin School) masters as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition - that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else."

"The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world."

"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time."

"Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own."

"A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers."

"Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel."

"Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace."

"Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."

"I believe in man?s unconscious mind, the deep spring from which comes his power to communicate and to love. For me, all art is a combination of these powers; for if love is the way we have of communicating personally in the deepest way, then what art can do is to extend this communication, magnify it, and carry it to vastly greater numbers of people. Therefore art is valid for the warmth and love it carries within it, even if it be the lightest entertainment, or the bitterest satire, or the most shattering tragedy."

"I believe in people. I feel, love, need, and respect people above all else, including the arts, natural scenery, organized piety, or nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the whole mountain disappear for me. One person fighting for the truth can disqualify for me the platitudes of centuries. And one human being who meets with injustice can render invalid the entire system which has dispensed it."

"I believe in the potential of people. I cannot rest passively with those who give up in the name of ?human nature.? Human nature is only animal nature if it is obliged to remain static. Without growth, without metamorphosis, there is no godhead. If we believe that man can never achieve a society without wars, then we are condemned to wars forever. This is the easy way. But the laborious, loving way, the way of dignity and divinity, presupposes a belief in people and in their capacity to change, grow, communicate, and love."

"We must encourage thought, free and creative. We must respect privacy. We must observe taste by not exploiting our sorrows, successes, or passions. We must learn to know ourselves better through art. We must rely more on the unconscious, inspirational side of man. We must not enslave ourselves to dogma. We must believe in the attainability of good. We must believe, without fear, in people."

"I believe that man?s noblest endowment is his capacity to change. Armed with reason, he can see two sides and choose: He can be divinely wrong. I believe in man?s right to be wrong. Out of this right he has built, laboriously and lovingly, something we reverently call democracy. He has done it the hard way and continues to do it the hard way ? by reason, by choosing, by error and rectification, by the difficult, slow method in which the dignity of A is acknowledged by B, without impairing the dignity of C. Man cannot have dignity without loving the dignity of his fellow."

"Being with young people has kept me alive, I tell you, and I would do anything for them. Think of what we can do with all that energy and all that spirit instead of eroding and degrading our planet on which we live, and disgracing ourselves as a race. I will spend my dying breath and my last blood and erg of energy to try to correct this impossible situation."

"Everyone who was born after 1945 when that bomb went off is a completely different kind of person from those who were born before then. Because they grew up in a world where the possibility of global destruction was an everyday possibility, to the point where they didn?t even think about it that much. But it conditions the way they live? Anybody who grows up ? as those of my generation did not ? taking the possibility of the immediate destruction of the planet for granted is going to gravitate all the more toward instant gratification ? you push the TV button, you dropthe acid, you snort the coke, you do the needle? and then you pass out in the bed ? and you wake up so cynical? And guilt breeds fear and anxiety, and anxiety breeds fear, and it goes around ? it?s that old vicious circle where one thing reinforces the other, which drives you day and night to instant gratification. Anything of a serious nature isn?t ?instant? ? you can?t ?do? the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God?s sake?"

"There is so much inherent goodness in people that if they aren?t inhibited by traumas and are given half a chance, it shines through."

"Though I can?t prove it, deep in my heart I know that every person is born with the love of learning. Without exception. Every infant studies its toes and fingers, and a child?s discovery of his or her voice must be one of the most extraordinary of life?s moments? Imagine an infant lying in its cradle, discovering its voice, purring and murmuring MMM to itself."

"No subject is too difficult to talk to the kids about. You just have to know where the pain is."

"We destroy our children?s songs of existence by giving them inhibitions, teaching them to be cynical, manipulative, and all the rest of it? You become hardened, but you can find that playfulness again. We?ve got to find a way to get music and kids together, as well as to teach teachers how to discover their own love of learning. Then the infectious process begins."

"We must get back to faith and hope and belief ? things we?re all born with. But unfortunately we?re also born thinking we?re the center of the universe. And of all traumas, that one is the biggest and most difficult to get rid of. And the hardest principle to absorb is the Copernican one: that you?re just another speck on this planet, which is a speck in the solar system, which is a speck in the galaxy, which is a speck in the universe ? which is a speck in something even bigger that we don?t have the minds to contemplate."