“The Goldberg Variations are, as explained in my booklet-text, in short, music that observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music that, like Baudelaire’s lovers, “rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.” Gould is referring here to the circular design of the work, a circularity whose development is polarized, inspired, and fed by more and more new energy fields. The result is a universe that in its significance resembles the alpha and omega of music in general, music that evolves out of nothing and disappears back into nothing as if in a state in which time stands still.”

Talkings on Bach

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Burkard Schliessmann33

classical pianist

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“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

Richard Dawkins book River Out of Eden

Source: River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

“Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1956)
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“I have composed this work neither for the common people, nor for beginners, nor for those who occupy themselves only with the Law as it is handed down without concerning themselves with its principles. The design of this work is rather to promote the true understanding of the real spirit of the Law”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

As quoted in The Jewish Encyclopedia (12 vols. 1901-1906) http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=905&letter=M Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction Context: I have composed this work neither for the common people, nor for beginners, nor for those who occupy themselves only with the Law as it is handed down without concerning themselves with its principles. The design of this work is rather to promote the true understanding of the real spirit of the Law, to guide those religious persons who, adhering to the Torah, have studied philosophy and are embarrassed by the contradictions between the teachings of philosophy and the literal sense of the Torah.

“The extraordinary stylistic changes of late eighteenth-century music may have provided much of the inspiration for the literature of the turn of the century, but the literary forms that resulted were deeply eccentric. It was these works—paradoxical, anticlassical, often with startlingly unbalanced proportions—which in turn influenced the music of the generation of composers that followed. The most clearly affected by literature and art were Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, but neither Mendelssohn nor Chopin remained untouched by literary developments, like the revival of Celtic and medieval poetry, as the overtures of Mendelssohn and the Ballades of Chopin explicitly demonstrate.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 2 : Fragments

“(…) New knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

(...) De nouvelles connaissances conduisent à reconnaître dans la théorie de l'évolution plus qu'une hypothèse. Il est en effet remarquable que cette théorie se soit progressivement imposée à l'esprit des chercheurs, à la suite d'une série de découvertes faites dans diverses disciplines du savoir. La convergence, nullement recherchée ou provoquée, des résultats de travaux menés indépendamment les uns des autres, constitue par elle même un argument significatif en faveur de cette théorie. early news reports mistranslated the French phrase plus qu'une hypothèse as "more than one hypothesis". http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/sciences/LifeScience/PhysicalAnthropology/EvolutionFact/Evolution/Evolution.htm Message to the participants in the Plenary of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 22 October 1996 Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/messages/pont_messages/1996/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_19961022_evoluzione_fr.html (French)

“I have always been interested in family history. Chromosomes are funny things, aren't they? They may skip a generation and you can find children who resemble the grandfather, rather than either parent. Heredity is more important than environment. Blood will tell. For example, a man is either musical by heredity or he is not. You can't make a man musical by the environment. You can find a person who is very musically inclined and be puzzled because neither parents nor grandparents had any ear for music. But if you trace it back, you will find that the great-grandfather was a musician. But the environment plays a great part in the development of a man. It is significant whether a man is brought up in the city or in the country, near a lake or on the shores of the ocean.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (21 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

“The Book of Boz is neither a novel nor a poem nor a tale. Even less is it a drama or an essay.
It is nothing except the style that inspires it and haunts it, to excess.
No points of reference here.
No beacon.
You sail wherever the wind blows.
Stories are woven, end, are reborn, with the flow, before a storm comes up to carry us further away, to the threshold of a new vision.
For, that is The Book of Boz : a work outside of norms, indefinable, created by a wanderer for other wanderers.”

Julien Friedler (1950) artist, writer

The Book of Boz http://www.spiritofboz.org/en/spirit-of-boz/the-book-of-boz/ The Spirit of Boz

“Music is the melody whose text is the world.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

“Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Source: 1960s, "Specific Objects," 1965, p. 74; Lead paragraph; partly cited in: Diane Waldman. Carl Andre https://archive.org/stream/carlandre00wald#page/6/mode/1up. Published 1970 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. p. 6 Context: Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common.

“We have lost the old love of work, of work which kept itself company, which was fair weather and music in the heart, which found its reward in the doing, craving neither the flattery of vulgar eyes nor the gold of vulgar men.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 21

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Burkard Schliessmann33

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