The best books — like the best music or television or movies or comics or video games — can challenge us and force us to think or perceive aspects of life that we may prefer to avoid. In a sense, they threaten us.
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exa...
We are the music makers, We are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams World-losers and world-forsakers. On whom the pale moon gleams. Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems.
Should you care to write (and only the saints know why you should) you must needs have knowledge and art and magic - the knowledge of the music of words, the art of being artless, and the magic of loving your readers.
The ideal architect should be a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, fam...
You might call them the icing on “life’s cake,” but music, laughter and the enjoyment of eating are the toppings that flavor everyday living. These added accents or accessories do spice up the cake. If served without, life would be rather bland...
Africa! the blessed land of pure wealth, the sons of the soil tremble over it as they beat the resounding drum; women dancing to the unifying joy of the music in the gold dust of dawn...beloved Africa your concealed power of hope shines.
Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world.
More are men's ends marked than their lives before. The setting sun, the music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in remembrance more than things long past.
Preposterous ass, that never read so far To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of man After his studies or his usual pain? (The Taming of the Shrew, 3.1.10-13), Lucentio
I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound...
I did musical theater, and I did dancing for what it was at the performing arts high school that I went to. I went to a school where I was there on a scholarship. So I think when you're on a scholarship, you always work a tad harder, or you want to w...
When I was in my teens, I thought, 'Would I like to try and work hard at being an actor, or do I want to work hard at doing something musical?' Acting won out, but I do really enjoy those moments where I get to just belt something out.
Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - t...
This Christian claim [of universal validity] is naturally offensive to the adherents of every other religious system. It is almost as offensive to modern man, brought up in the atmosphere of relativism, in which tolerance is regarded almost as the hi...
We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It's like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That's what is happening. ...
But the fantasy kingdom and trappings of success soon lost their luster, as I discovered that the most prestigious and remunerative of my resume's way stations was also the most tedious and unfulfilling I had ever experienced. This paradox only made ...
Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable pro...
If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more...
The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in o...
Meditation is one of the most serious things; you do it all day, in the office, with the family, when you say to somebody "I love you", when you are considering your children, when you educate them to become soldiers, to kill, to be nationalized, wor...
