Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 143
“The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.”
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet
Heraclitus, Fragments, 54; http://philoctetes.free.fr/heraclitefraneng.htm and http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM; also translated in such variants as:<br>The unapparent connection is more powerful than the apparent one<br>The hidden harmony is better than the open one. <br class="br">Misattributed
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Not found in any of Thomas Jefferson's writings. This may be a conflation of Jefferson's "chains of the Constitution" comment with Ayn Rand's statement in her essay, Man's Rights: "There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two — by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first." http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/two-enemies-people-are-criminals-and-governmentquotation <br class="br">Misattributed
“Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body.”
Martha Graham (1894–1991) American dancer and choreographer
New York Times interview (1985)
Context: To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show.
Shirley Abbott (1934)
Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), p. 1 (opening lines)
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist
Quote from Gauguin's unfinished essay 'Notes Synthetiques', published in the July / September 1910 issue of ' Vers et Prose' XXII, pp. 51-55, as cited in: Shannon N. Pritchard, Gino Severini and the symbolist aesthetics of his futurist dance imagery, 1910-1915 https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/pritchard_shannon_n_200305_ma.pdf Diss. uga, 2003, p. 23 <br class="br">Gauguin's essay 'Notes Synthetiques' was written in Pont -Aven in 1888 and left incomplete. His essay was first published in 'Vers et Prose' XXII <br class="br">1890s - 1910s
“Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.”
Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi.
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher
Letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712.
Arthur Schopenhauer paraphrased this quotation in the first book of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: Musica est exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi. (Music is a hidden metaphysical exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is philosophizing.)
