Quotes about rhythm

A collection of quotes on the topic of rhythm, life, music, likeness.

Quotes about rhythm

“Yoga is like music: the rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life/”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 59-60

Life, Music, Soul

“If Germany stays united and marches to the rhythm of its revolutionary socialist outlook, it will be unbeatable. Our indestructible will to life, and the driving force of the Führer’s personality guarantee this.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

“The Winter Crisis is Over” speech on June 4, 1943 at the Berlin Sport Palace, “Überwundene Winterkrise, Rede im Berliner Sportpalast,” Der steile Aufstieg (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1944), pp. 287-306.
1940s

Life, Personality

“You know, my temperature's risin'
and the jukebox blows a fuse
My heart's beatin' rhythm
and my soul keeps on singin' the blues
Roll Over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Roll Over Beethoven" (1956) · Live performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT3kCVFFLNg Song lyrics

Soul, Heart

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, V.
1930s

Music, Imagination

“In our brief life,
so many roads,
so many miracles
and blessings and glories,
but also so many curses and denials,
grief and contempt,
continuous waves on the planetary seas
that come and go,
and they crawl us into the vast heavens,
n that quiet rhythm universe
listen to your heart beat.”

Alexis Karpouzos movie We are the conversation

The film ''We are the conversation'', gathers together the most famous poems and poets from all over the world. It is a celebration of our linguistic diversity and a reminder of our commonalities and the fundamental role verbal art plays in human life around the world.
Alexis karpouzos

“Music is associated not only with speculation but with morality. When rhythms and modes reach an intellect through the ear, they doubtless affect and reshape that mind according to their particular character.”

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century

Christopher Callahan (October 2000), Music in Medieval Medical Practice: Speculations and Certainties https://symposium.music.org/index.php/40/item/2168-music-in-medieval-medical-practice-speculations-and-certainties#16 De Institutione Musica

Music

“Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Faith, Time, Night

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Music, Star, Dance

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”

Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American writer

Happiness, Happy, Back To Work

“There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.
Someone had stolen a book.”

Terry Pratchett book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

Books, Soul

“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”

Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature

Source: The Great God Brown and Other Plays

Love, Life, Beauty, Music

“The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Universe

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Sense, Time

“Music and comedy are so linked. The rhythm of comedy is connected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.”

Conan O'Brien (1963) American television show host and comedian

Music

“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1910s, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)

Life, Nature, Sense

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), pp. 158-159

Life, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“Those American comics themselves were heavily influenced by Keaton’s comedies, Mack Sennett, those sorts of films from the golden age of comedy. The gagmen that appeared there, for example Roscoe Arbuckle or Ben Turpin, there were lots of comics that used their style, their faces just as is. Especially Chaplin with his bowed legs and over-sized shoes. Those sorts of features were used directly in comics. In that era, all American cartoonists imitated the stars of comedy. That is what I worked so hard at copying, and so that’s why my comics are bowlegged and big-shoed. At the level of content too I was deeply influenced by the strong social caricatures of Chaplin’s comedies, the tears mixed with the laughter. The biggest influence of all was the rhythm.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

Source: http://www.tcj.com/tezuka-osamu-and-american-comics/ Tezuka Osamu and American Comics

Age, Shoe, Star, Tear

“This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Chihuahua and Sonora: The Green Lagoons", p. 149.

Death, Music, Understanding, Thinking

“I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Nobel Banquet Speech (10 December 1929) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1929/mann-speech.html

Life, Peace, Art, Nature

“It would be relevant … to point out the sinister part played by speed, by belief in speed as a value, by, in a word, a kind of impatience that has had a profound effect in changing even the very rhythms of the life of the spirit for the worse.”

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), p. 144

Life, Change, Parting, Speed

“Oh, eternal mother of mysteries
who, in suffering and lust, conceives
numerous lives, who creates
a thousand twists, a thousand hues, and shades,
what is the spring of these eternal rhythms?”

Yeghishe Charents (1897–1937) Armenian poet

Dantesque Legend (1916)

Spring, Suffering

“Simple melody and variety in rhythm.”

Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) Italian composer

Melodia semplice e varietà nel ritmo.
His motto for Italian music, formulated in a letter to Filippo Filippi, August 26, 1868; Luca Somigli Legitimizing the Artist (2003) p. 103.
Often misquoted as "Simple melody – clear rhythm!"

“Chons, on rhythm guitar, had long black hair and blue eyes and was the first person I ever met who said she never ate meat, and when she told me that, I never ate it again either. Best thing that ever happened to me. All it took was the mere suggestion. Nobody else was vegetarian that I knew of, but I started to think of meat-eating as a very weird practice and secretly regarded meat-eaters with distaste, almost contempt. Why would anyone kill an animal if they didn’t need to? I learned to live and associate with “the majority,” but never respected them. I got used to having this lack of regard for 97 percent of the population.”

Chrissie Hynde (1951) Rock singer-songwriter and founder of Pretenders

Reckless (2015)

Thinking, Learning, Animals, Personality

“Language is texture of images and music. We speak in images and rhythm, by taking help of words.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

Foreword, 'Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika', Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DQPD8F4/ From Prose

Music, Help

“To Be or Not to Be: In Nature all life is a question of the minutest, but extremely precisely graduated differences in the particular thermal motion within every single body, which continually changes in rhythm with the processes of pulsation. This unique law, which manifests itself throughout Nature's vastness and unity and expresses itself in every creature and organism, is the ' law of ceaseless cycles' that in every organism is linked to a certain time span and a particular tempo. The slightest disturbance of this harmony can lead to the most disastrous consequences for the major life forms. In order to preserve this state of equilibrium, it is vital that the characteristic inner temperature of each of the millions of micro-organisms contained in the macro-organisms be maintained.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Water Wizard
Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Life, Law, Question, Nature

“Try it again, breathing's just a rhythm”

Regina Spektor (1980) American singer-songwriter and pianist

"One More Time With Feeling"
Far (2009)

“[Serafin was] an extraordinary coach, sharp as a vecchio lupo [old wolfe]. He opened a world to me, showed me there was a reason for everything, that even fiorature and trills… have a reason in the composer's mind, that they are the expression of the stato d'animo [state of mind] of the character — that is, the way he feels at the moment, the passing emotions that take hold of him. He would coach us for every little detail, every movement, every word, every breath. One of the things he told me — and this is the basis of bel canto — is never to attack a note from underneath or from above, but always to prepare it in the face. He taught me that pauses are often more important than the music. He explained that there was a rhythm — these are the things you get only from that man! — a measure for the human ear, and that if a note was too long, it was no good after a while. A fermata always must be measured, and if there are two fermate close to one another in the score, you ignore one of them. He taught me the proportions of recitative — how it is elastic, the proportions altering so slightly that only you can understand it…. But in performance he left you on your own. "When I am in the pit, I am there to serve you, because I have to save my performance." he would say. We would look down and feel we had a friend there. He was helping you all the way. He would mouth all the words. If you were not well, he would speed up the tempo, and if you were in top form, he would slow it down to let you breathe, to give you room. He was breathing with you, living the music with you, loving it with you. It was elastic, growing, living.”

Maria Callas (1923–1977) American-born Greek operatic soprano

Callas : The Art and the Life (1974)

Love, World, Music, Way

“Thoughts in a poem. The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

1.189
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“What good poetry and good prose have in common is vitality of rhythm.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

“Working to timings and synchronising your musical thoughts with the film can be stimulating rather than restrictive. Scoring is a limitation but like any limitation is can be made to work for you. Verdi, except for a handful of pieces, worked best when he was 'turned on' by a libretto. The most difficult problem in music is form, and in a film you already have this problem solved for you. You are presented with a basic structure, a blueprint, and provided the film has been well put together, well edited, it often suggests its own rhythms and tempo. The quality of the music is strictly up to the composer. Many people seem to assume that because film music serves the visual it must be something of secondary value. Well, the function of any art is to serve a purpose in society. For many years, music and painting served religion. The thing to bear in mind is that film is the youngest of the arts, and that scoring is the youngest of the music arts. We have a great deal of development ahead of us.”

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004) film composer

ibid., p. 209

People, Religion, Art, Music

“An uneasy rhythm of life
is more life like than an easy death.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

Khorampa https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/khorampa/ From Poetry

Life, Death

“I feel in my heart all commotions and all contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life. But I struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart — to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: I put my body through its paces like a war horse; I keep it lean, sturdy, prepared. I harden it and I pity it. I have no other steed.
I keep my brain wide awake, lucid, unmerciful. I unleash it to battle relentlessly so that, all light, it may devour the darkness of the flesh. I have no other workshop where I may transform darkness into light.
I keep my heart flaming, courageous, restless. I feel in my heart all commotions and all contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life. But I struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart — to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.

Life, Feeling, Universe, Heart

“And the rhythm of the fight is the supreme harmony. Such harmony is not for thy mortal ears. It is enough for thee to know that it exists. Do thy duty in peace and leave the rest to the Gods.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Journey's End: The Burning Bush (1911)
Context: "Thou art not alone, and thou dost not belong to thyself. Thou art one of My voices, thou art one of My arms. Speak and strike for Me. But if the arm be broken, or the voice be weary, then still I hold My ground: I fight with other voices, other arms than thine. Though thou art conquered, yet art thou of the army which is never vanquished. Remember that and thou wilt fight even unto death."
"Lord, I have suffered much!"
"Thinkest thou that I do not suffer also? For ages death has hunted Me and nothingness has lain in wait for Me. It is only by victory in the fight that I can make My way. The river of life is red with My blood."
"Fighting, always fighting?"
"We must always fight. God is a fighter, even He Himself. God is a conqueror. He is a devouring lion. Nothingness hems Him in and He hurls it down. And the rhythm of the fight is the supreme harmony. Such harmony is not for thy mortal ears. It is enough for thee to know that it exists. Do thy duty in peace and leave the rest to the Gods."

God, Peace, Fight

“For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Paris Review interview (1956)
Context: For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Question

“Epic shouts passed, and trumpet calls, and tempestuous sounds borne upon sovereign rhythms. For in that sonorous soul everything took shape in sound. It sang of light. It sang of darkness, sang of life and death. It sang for those who were victorious in battle. It sang for himself who was conquered and laid low. It sang. All was song. It was nothing but song.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Journey's End: The Burning Bush (1911)
Context: God was not to him the impassive Creator, a Nero from his tower of brass watching the burning of the City to which he himself has set fire. God was fighting. God was suffering. Fighting and suffering with all who fight and for all who suffer. For God was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading out, reaching out, drinking up the night. But the night is limitless, and the Divine struggle will never cease: and none can know how it will end. It was a heroic symphony wherein the very discords clashed together and mingled and grew into a serene whole! Just as the beech-forest in silence furiously wages war, so Life carries war into the eternal peace.
The wars and the peace rang echoing through Christophe. He was like a shell wherein the ocean roars. Epic shouts passed, and trumpet calls, and tempestuous sounds borne upon sovereign rhythms. For in that sonorous soul everything took shape in sound. It sang of light. It sang of darkness, sang of life and death. It sang for those who were victorious in battle. It sang for himself who was conquered and laid low. It sang. All was song. It was nothing but song.

Life, Death, Soul, Light

“I love the stuff and material of writing: words. The games you can play with them. The rhythm and lyricism in a good passage of writing. The power of a simple sentence. I also love the paradoxical bind of writing as both freedom and constraint. You start creating characters and scenes out of thin air. But if you do it well enough, that freedom constricts, because your characters are no longer inside you. They become their own people, agents on the page who need to act and think and feel in ways true to who they are…”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

On writing as a kind of spiritual act in “Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/both-freedom-and-constraint-an-interview-with in Words Without Borders (May 2015)

Love, People, Making love, Way

“Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.”

Helder Camara (1909–1999) Brazilian Catholic priest, archbishop of Olinda and Recife

Source: Spiral Of Violence

Love, Men, World

“Patience is… clearly not fatalistic, shoulder-shrugging resignation. It is the acceptance of a divine rhythm to life; it is obedience prolonged. Patience stoutly resists pulling up the daisies to see how the roots are doing.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Life, Patience

“I love feeling the rhythm of other people's lives. It's like traveling.”

Banana Yoshimoto book The Lake

Source: The Lake

Love, People, Travel, Feeling

“But you have to learn to bend a little,” said Clary with a yawn. Despite the story’s content, the rhythm of Jace’s voice had made her sleepy. “Or you’ll break.” “Not if you're strong enough,” said Jace firmly.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Strong, Learning

“So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Change

“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Dance

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Suffering

“Light and darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being in joyful rhythm.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Source: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Light, Dance

“For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

Law, Confidence, Nature

“His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that… only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Life, Angels

“daddy says the world is
a drum tight and hard
and i told him
i’m gonna beat
out my own rhythm”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

World

“Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.”

Louise Erdrich book The Round House

Source: The Round House

Women, Men

“Maybe it was just part of growing up with someone. Once you have a rhythm and stay with it long enough, it's not hard to find again.”

Sarah Dessen book The Moon and More

Source: The Moon and More

Parting

“We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

People, Music, Thinking, Sense

“You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: Nausea

Suffering

“When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

Dreams, Music, Silence, Parting

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs… The way I write is who I am, or have become…”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Way, Sense

“Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.”

Frances Mayes book Under the Tuscan Sun

Source: Under the Tuscan Sun

Feeling, Business, Country

“Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Light, Dance

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Life has its rhythm ad we have ours. They’re designed to coexist in harmony, so that when we do what is ours to do and otherwise let life be, we garner acceptance and serenity. (285)”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Source: Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit

Life

“Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: How Proust Can Change Your Life

Dead

“I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.”

Anna Funder (1966) Australian writer

Source: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Freedom, Training

“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

Mountain, Learning

“Time was something that moved in fits and starts for Magnus, dissipating like mist or dragging like chains, but when Alec was here, Magnus’s time seemed to fall into an easy rhythm with Alec’s, like two heartbeats falling into sync.”

Cassandra Clare The Bane Chronicles

Source: The Bane Chronicles

Time

“I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Harmonium (1923)

“Live by your own rules Move to your rhythm, instead of dancing to the beat of someone else’s drum Decide how you want to be treated Choose what you will or will not tolerate Leave if you don’t get what you want.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

Dance

“If you allow your rhythm to be interrupted, you'll create a void. Then to replace what you give up, you'll start to expect and need more from your partner.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”

Thomas Merton book No Man Is an Island

Source: No Man Is an Island

Music, Silence

“What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Madness

“He put his hand on my waist, and my heart began to pound, a rougher rhythm than the music. I held my skirt. Our free hands met. His felt warm and comforting and unsettling and bewildering--all at once.”

Gail Carson Levine Ella Enchanted

Source: Ella Enchanted

Music, Heart

“Oh God, Frankie, I breathe in rhythm with that man. You think that's not my flesh and blood after all these years?”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Saving Francesca

God, Thinking

“It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

Life

“To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.”

Alice Sebold book The Almost Moon

Source: The Almost Moon

Time

“Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Universe, Dance

“His blood coursed through my veins sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestats words made sense to me.
I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard his heart in that terrible rhythm,
I knew again what peace could be.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Life, Peace, Sense, Heart

“In those three years, (from fourteen to seventeen years old)… I came to understand the meaning of a drawing from the life, the synthesis of my art, and the rhythm of animais. I remember that a companion of those days,' of whom I hâve since lost sight, made me see, in a couple of hours, on a very true and simple principle, an observation of the necessary equilibria of movement not taught in the schools, the secret of the plans of a figure. That lesson has influenced my whole life. As for the ornament-maker, in whose workshop I earned a scanty wage, I long deplored being constrained to do so, but I hâve since thought with affection of it, understanding that there are as many sources of beauty in ornament as in the face.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 2-3

Life, Secret, School, Beauty

“The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace - this magic, organic agora - starts to splutter, and people suffer.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Beck Breaks from the Pack,” http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=546 WorldNetDaily.com, April 23, 2010. 2010s, 2010

Life, People, Suffering, Time

“Poetry's only crucial attribute is rhythm. This is its heartbeat. This makes it memorable. If the rhythm falters, then the poem dies of heart failure.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

Failure, Heart

“The school of art which Hulme started and Pound established.. diction, rhythm and metre were fully emancipated from formal artifice and the poet was free to act creatively under the laws of his own origination.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

School, Law, Art

“We are but artless folk and not expert in rhythm, time, and tune, but that does not matter. He for whom we sing our hymns understands them all, and he pays no attention to our deficiencies of execution.”

Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) Indian scholar, social reformer and author

His comment to his wife On his daily prayers he would sings devotional songs out of tune and metre. Quoted in page=104

Understanding, Singing, Time

“The disharmoniousness (one might say, the negative rhythm) of the individual forms was that which primarily drew me, attracted me, during the period to which this watercolor belongs. The so-called rhythmic always comes on its own because in general the person himself is rhythmically built. Thus at least on the surface, the rhythmic is innate in people. Children, 'primitive' peoples, and laymen draw rhythmically..
In that period my soul was especially enchanted by the not-fitting-together of drawn and painterly form. Line serves the plane in that the former bounds the latter. And it makes my heart race in those cases when the independent plane springs over the confining line: line and plane are not in tune! It was this that produced a strong inner emotion in me, the inner 'ah!”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

2 quotes from Kandinsky's letter to Hans Arp, November 1912; in Friedel, Wassily Kandinsky, p. 489; as cited in Negative Rhythm: Intersections Between Arp, Kandinsky, Münter, and Taeuber, Bibiana K. Obler (including transl. - Yale University Press, 2014 Kandinsky was trying to explain to Arp his state of mind when he made his sketch for 'Improvisation with Horses' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Wassily_Kandinsky_Cossacks_or_Cosaques_1910%E2%80%931.jpg, 1911, a watercolor belonging to Arp. Kandinsky had told Arp that he could have one of his pictures included in the 'Moderne Bund' (second) exhibition in Zurich, 1912, and this was the one Arp selected 1910 - 1915

Children, People, Soul, Spring

“I am searching for the proper harmony of rhythm and unchanging proportion, as I wrote in the article. And I cannot tell you how difficult it is. [Mondrian is reacting on Van Doesburg criticism of the strong domination of the regular grid in Mondrian's latest paintings]”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In Mondrian's letter to Theo van Doesburg, Paris, 16 September 1919; as quoted in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 171
1910's

Search, Strong, Painting

“[David Sylvester asked Gottlieb, he is aware of the impact of the city New York on his painting:] Definitely I am. When I was in Paris last spring, my original plan was to go for four months and to paint there, and a number of people urged me to stay. That wanted to see what would happen, how my painting would change. But I felt strongly after being there less than a month that it was necessary for me to come back to New York, because I feel a certain rhythm in New York I don't feel in Paris.... there is a tempo in the life of New York which is exhilarating and I feel that this gets into one's painting. It's the pulse, not the look. I'am not involved with the external appearance of the city; it’s the vibrations. ]”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

In an interview (March 1960) with David Sylvester, edited for broadcasting by the BBC first published in ‘Living Arts, June 1963; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 33
1960s

Life, People, Feeling, Spring

“What's holding me up is I'm confused about the nature of the music. Because the modern music doesn't reach me. I mean to say the sound of the modern electric production. A lot of sequencers… synths. That's what people are buying. Because that doesn't reach me, it throws me back to like 1948, but I don't want to be there. Back there, I'm talking about blues records…. The roots of rock 'n' roll is rhythm and blues and that's like really where I'm at, where I was always at.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Strummer on Man, God, Law and the Clash (31 January 1988)

People, Music, Nature

“There's always rhythm going in my mind. … I'm either singing them — June will tell you, I'm either singing them, or I have got the beat going from one, or I'm writing one.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

CNN interview (2002)

Singing

“Harmony, rhythm, concision, concinnity are all elements that are epitomized in poetry. Cultivated in poetry, which is the nucleus of the creative impulse, these elemetns serve every art form: acting a character, writing a novel, creating music, dance, sculpture, painting.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Degrees: Thought Capsules and Micro Tales (1989)

Art, Music, Dance, Painting

“Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“There is very little dispute about the principal constituent elements of music, though experts will differ on the precise definitions of each aspect. Most central are 'pitch' (or melody) and 'rhythm'… next in importance only to pitch and rhythm is 'timbre', the characteristic qualities of tone.”

Howard Gardner (1943) American developmental psychologist

Source: Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences., 1983, p.104

Music

“As I admired it [a red pencil and chalk drawing by Degas of a young mother, nursing her child] he showed me a whole series done from the same model and with the same sort of rhythm. He is a draughtsman of the first order; it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting to the public, which generally imagines that the impressionists work in a very casual way. I do not think it possible to go further in the rendering of form.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

note in Berthe's Journal, Jan. 1886; as quoted in The Private Lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, pp. 262-263
Berthe visited Degas in his studio
1881 - 1895

Way, Imagination, Thinking, Study

“As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful."”

Norman Maclean (1902–1990) American author and scholar

"A River Runs Through It", p. 2
A River Runs Through It (1976)

God, Beauty, Nature, Tree

“In terms of composition the new plasticism is dualistic. Through the exact reconstruction of cosmic relations it is a direct expression of the universal; by its rhythm, by the material reality of its plastic form, it expresses the artist's individual subjectivity. It thus unfolds before us a whole world of universal beauty without thereby renouncing the human element.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

World, Beauty, Reality, Universe