An Empty Message

“The hardest of all adventures to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of. If music could be translated into human speech it would no longer need to exist. Like love, music’s a mystery which, when solved, evaporates.” — Ned Rorem, Music From Inside Out, 1967

“Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.” — Eduard Hanslick

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” — Victor Hugo

But music moves us, and we know not why;
We feel the tears, but cannot trace their source.
Is it the language of some other state,
Born of its memory? For what can wake
The soul’s strong instinct of another world,
Like music?

— Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Golden Violet, 1827

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“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” — Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, Jan. 21, 1980

February 12, 2019 | Quotations

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“None think the great unhappy but the great.” — Edward Young

January 23, 2019January 22, 2019 | Quotations

Misc

The negative space in the eight of diamonds forms an 8.
William Brewster, leader of the Plymouth Colony, named his children Jonathan, Patience, Fear, Love, and Wrestling.
Wilfred Owen’s mother received the news of his death on Armistice Day.
SCHOOLMASTER = SMOTE SCHOLAR
“I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.” — William James

January 18, 2019January 17, 2019 | History · Language · Literature · Oddities · Quotations

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“Abstinence from doing is often as generous as doing, but it is not so apparent.” — Montaigne

January 11, 2019January 10, 2019 | Quotations

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“The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters.” — William Shenstone, “On Writing and Books,” 1769

December 20, 2018December 19, 2018 | Quotations

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“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” — Bertrand Russell

November 30, 2018 | Quotations

History

“It is conceivable that Alexander the Great — for all the military successes of his youth, for all the excellence of the army he trained, for all the desire he felt in himself to change the world — might have stopped at the Hellespont, and never crossed it, and not out of fear, not out of indecisiveness, not out of weakness of will, but from heavy legs.” — Kafka

November 28, 2018 | History · Literature · Quotations

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“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.” — Baudelaire

November 7, 2018 | Quotations

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“There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.” — Randall Jarrell

October 16, 2018 | Quotations