“Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.”

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Robert G. Ingersoll439

Union United States Army officer 1833–1899

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“My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.”

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Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

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“Every speech is at once a language serving the purposes of will, expressing intimate desires and commands, and at same time expressing thoughts by a sequence of concepts.”

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“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

“Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.”

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“For me it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes of moulding and organizing. When I use language, I try to induce the impulses of this power.... the power of evolution.
But language is not to be understood simply in terms of speech and words. That is our current, drastically reduced, understanding of language... Beyond language as verbalization lies a world of sound and form impulses, a language of primary sound without semantic content, but laden with completely different levels of information.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote of Caroline Tisdall, 1979, p. 210; as cited in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 180
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