#pose

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose. ↗

— George Will

#conservatives #define #oppose #terms #themselves

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art. ↗

— Frank Lloyd Wright

#art #measure #qualities #repose #simplicity

And it's one reason why I don't go to a lot of movies - they're more and more dominated by corporate values and fiscal concerns as opposed to cinematic concerns. ↗

— Jeffrey Wright

#concerns #corporate #dominated #fiscal #go

Life is supposed to be a series of peaks and valleys. The secret is to keep the valleys from becoming Grand Canyons. ↗

— Bern Williams

#canyons #grand #keep #life #peaks

We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it. ↗

— Rick Wright

#composes #elton #elton john #example #for example

I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose. ↗

— Elinor Wylie

#able #am #better #heaven #hell

How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life--in short, without you, my life is no life. [Written to his wife, Mileva] ↗

— Albert Einstein

#enjoyment #everything #fulfillment #hollow #life

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians. ↗

— Frank Zappa

#around #assistance #composer #forcing #goes

It was not simply out of a spirit of contradiction that I exposed a light source to magnetic forces. The idea came to me during an investigation of the effect discovered by Kerr on light reflected by magnetic mirrors. ↗

— Pieter Zeeman

#contradiction #discovered #during #effect #exposed

Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end. To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!” How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner. ↗

— David Mitchell

#composer #immortality #music #age