“There is a man, playing a violin, and the strings are the nerves in his own arm…”

“He lifted the violin to his shoulder then, and raised the bow. And he played.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

“A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.”

Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) French writer

“He boxed as though he were playing the violin.”

Sugar Ray Robinson (1921–1989) American boxer

“The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life… He played that which he would never play again.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

“As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibres, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie book Man a Machine

“You’re familiar with the phrase «Man’s reach exceeds his grasp»? It’s a lie. Man’s grasp exceeds his nerve. ”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

“What is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?”

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, born 1588

“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer