Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer
As reported by Elizabeth Brentano (Bettina) in a letter to Goethe, 27 May 1810.
Quoted in Edwin Burgum The new criticism (1930), p. 179
Les plus beaux mots du monde ne sont que de vains sons, si on ne les comprend pas. <br class="br">Series I : Propos de rentrée: la terre et la langue http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Propos_de_rentr%C3%A9e_:_la_terre_et_la_langue <br class="br">The Literary Life (1888-1892)
Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer
As reported by Elizabeth Brentano (Bettina) in a letter to Goethe, 27 May 1810.
Quoted in Edwin Burgum The new criticism (1930), p. 179
Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995) French musicologist
Pierre Schaeffer: an Interview with the Pioneer of Musique Concrete (Records Quarterly magazine, vol. 2, n° 1; 1987)
Interviews
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician
Letter to his nephew, Thomas Pitt (12 October 1751), quoted in W. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle (eds.), The Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London: 1838), p. 62.
“Honesty always sounds like impudence to the vain and stupid.”
Orson Scott Card book Stone Tables
Stone Tables (1997)
R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer
Atlas, on bearing the burden of maintaining the worlds, in Ch. 4
Space Chantey (1968)
Context: I tried to tell you, but words will not convey it. One has to be inside it to comprehend the magnitude. … It was the beginning. It's the only thing there is. But it was haphazard for so many aeons that it spooks me to think about it. There were always three or four maintaining it, but there was no one person strong enough to take it all over. "Somewhere there must be someone strong enough to take it all over," I said to myself in a direful moment, but the strongest person I could think of was myself. I've been doing it ever since. … By my attention I hold it all in being. Nothing exists unless it is perceived. If perception fails for a moment, then that thing fails forever. … I hate to be misjudged. They say that I bear it all on my shoulders, as though I were a stud or a balk. It's not on my great shoulders, it is amazing head on my great shoulders that maintains all.
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
“[T]he rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear.”
Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa
Part III, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)