#cian

Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art. ↗

— Robert Schumann

#composers #improvising #music #musicians #art

[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing. ↗

— Aristophanes

#attributes #barter #character #demagoguery #government

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer. ↗

— Patti Smith

#magic #magician #priest #religion #religion

If I have to beat you up to keep you safe, that’s just what I’ll do. It’s this kind of regard for others that makes me believe I’d be a good politician. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#awareness #bad #fight #good #oppression

When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone. ↗

— Fiona Apple

#loneliness #musician #people #society #society

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day. ↗

— Tom Waits

#individuality #music #musician #non-conformity #humor

Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily. ↗

— Rachel Hartman

#belief

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. ↗

— Sofia Kovalevskaya

#impossible #mathematician #poet #soul #without

And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it. ↗

— Wynton Marsalis

#wynton-marsalis #musician

Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers. ↗