Quotes about sound
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Basil Bunting (1900–1985) Poet

I SUGGEST Advice to Young Poets

“I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions.
Next I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs.
And, finally I believe if an organization is to meet the challenge of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life.
Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing…”

Thomas Watson, Jr. (1914–1993) American businessman and diplomat

Watson, Jr. (1962) as cited in: Heather Clark, John Chandler, Jim Barry (1994) Organisation and Identities: : Text and Readings in Organizational Behaviour. p. 355.

Life, World, Faith, Change

“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Pacifism and Philosophy" (1936)

War

“I had tasted the bait and knew that there was nothing more attractive and more subtle on earth than the Game. I had also observed fairly early that this enchanting Game demanded more than naive amateur players, that it took total possession of the man who had succumbed to its magic. And an instinct within me rebelled against my throwing all my energies and interests into this magic forever. Some naive feeling for simplicity, for wholeness and soundness, warned me against the spirit of the Waldzell Vicus Lusorum. I sensed in it a spirit of specialism and virtuosity, certainly highly cultivated, certainly richly elaborated, but nevertheless isolated from humanity and the whole of life — a spirit that had soared too high into haughty solitariness. For years I doubted and probed, until the decision had matured within me and in spite of everything I decided in favor of the Game. I did so because I had within me that urge to seek the supreme fulfillment and serve only the greatest master.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Life, Feeling, Game, Decision

“We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

People, Age, Sadness, Music

“Friends — They are like air bubbles on water, hastening to flow together. History tells of Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, but why should not we put to shame those old reserved worthies by a community of such? Constantly, as it were through a remote skylight, I have glimpses of a serene friendship-land, and know the better why brooks murmur and violets grow. This conjunction of souls, like waves which met and break, subsides also backward over things, and gives all a fresh aspect. I would live henceforth with some gentle soul such a life as may be conceived, double for variety, single for harmony — two, only that we might admire at our oneness — one, because indivisible. Such community to be a pledge of holy living. How could aught unworthy be admitted into our society? To listen with one ear to each summer sound, to behold with one eye each summer scene, our visual rays so to meet and mingle with the object as to be one bent and doubled; with two tongues to be wearied, and thought to spring ceaselessly from a double fountain.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

January 26, 1840
Journals (1838-1859)

Life, Friendship, Soul, History

“A kick that scarce would move a horse
May kill a sound divine.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

The Yearly Distress.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Horse

“.. in spite of the fact that it often feels as though the meaning of words and sentences were conveyed to us by the sounds of speech or the signs on a printed page, It is easy to show that meanings do not travel through space and must under all circumstances be constructed in the head of the language users.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Von Glasersfeld (1989, p. 444) cited in: Wolff-Michael Roth (2011) Passibility: At the Limits of the Constructivist Metaphor. p. 110

Travel, Feeling

“Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://niralimagazine.com/2004/10/not-so-missing-in-action/ with Nirali magazine (October 2004) Sourced quotes

Music, Dance

“An essential element in forming a single electorate is the sense that in the last resort all parts of it stand, or fall, survive or perish, together. This sense the British do not share with the inhabitants of the continent of Western Europe. Of all the nations of Europe Britain and Russia alone, though for opposite reasons, have this in common: they can be defeated in the decisive land battle and still survive. This characteristic Russia owes to her immensity. Britain owes it to her ditch. The British feel – and I believe that instinct corresponds with sound military reason – that the ditch is as significant in what we call the nuclear age as it proved to be in the air age and had been in the age of the Grande Armée of Napoleon or the Spanish infantry of Philip II. Error or truth, myth or reality, the belief itself is a habit of mind which has helped to form the national identity of the British and cannot be divorced from it.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Lyons (12 February 1971), from The Common Market: The Case Against (Elliot Right Way Books, 1971), pp. 68-69.
1970s

Truth, Age, Error, Feeling

“Scum, nazi, filth, trash, garbage, maggots. We're all ruled by little chicken-neck nellies, going "Kill everybody! I get off when I talk about cutting people's power off! I'm a nelly!" RAARGH! Just simpering control freaks, in big nerd packs, taking everything over, ruling everything. Becoming police officers with weapons, tasering us for fun. I've had it with control freaks and scum! You people are cancer! Ugh! Alright, I'm not in a good mood now. I start thinking about Bill Gates, that little chicken-neck, hopping around, little murdering eugenicist. You know how he walks, like a demonic elf. "I'm Bill Gates! I'm gonna shoot you up with something that's gonna kill you deader than a hammer. How's a 30 year death from gut disease sound, African children? Roll up the sleeves! I'm a little chicken-neck bastard, and nobody's got the will to see what I am!"”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

Alex's Bill Gates Chicken-Neck Bastard 'Rant' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg-5WgcMV_o, September 2011.

Death, Children, People, Disease

“We are honored for research which is today referred to as the "Two Neutrino Experiment". How does one make this research comprehensible to ordinary people? In fact "The Two Neutrinos" sounds like an Italian dance team. How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially in literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick? This is a dilemma and an anguish for all scientists because the public understanding of science is no longer a luxury of cultural engagement, but it is an essential requirement for survival in our increasingly technological age: In this context, I believe this Nobel Ceremony with its awesome tradition and pomp has as one of its most important benefits; the public attention it draws to science and its practitioners.”

Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018) American mathematician and physicist

Lederman's speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1988 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/lederman-speech.html (URL accessed on October 20, 2008)

People, Age, Beauty, Literature

“No cow gives milk unless she gets pregnant and gives birth to a calf. (I remember one dairy farmer I visited insisting that the cow would be in pain unless she was milked; true, but only because she had just given birth to a calf who was no longer present.) The milk is meant for the calf. … But our greed is greater than any reasonable person could expect: we do not allow the calf even the small amount he or she would normally take in a day. We want it all. So the calf is separated from the cow immediately upon birth. The industry says this must happen instantaneously, for otherwise there is a risk—no, it is a certainty—that the two will bond. In fact, they have already bonded, just as much as would a human mother with her baby. The strong bond is inborn in all mammals. The terrible sound one hears on any dairy farm after a cow has given birth is the call of a lost calf, calling her mother, and the mother answering in desperation. If that is not suffering, I don't know the meaning of the word.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Face on Your Plate (2009), Ch. 2, pp. 79-80

Pain, Birth, Strong, Suffering

“Back in those days, when I heard a mod that was better than mine I went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out how this sound was made and how the idea was thought up. I still think this way.”

Jesper Kyd (1972) musician

Amiga Music Preservation interview, 2006

Way, Idea, Thinking, Drawing

“Perish that thought! No, never be it said
That Fate itself could awe the soul of Richard.
Hence, babbling dreams! you threaten here in vain!
Conscience, avaunt! Richard ’s himself again!
Hark! the shrill trumpet sounds to horse! away!
My soul ’s in arms, and eager for the fray.”

Colley Cibber Richard III

Act V, scene 3.
Richard III (altered) (1700)

Fate, Dreams, Soul, Horse

“Matrimony must be like a sound flogging, for it makes the veriest block-heads learn something.”

Alessandro Pepoli (1757–1796) Italian writer

Il matrimonio bisogna che sia un vero castigo, poichè fa diventar savi anche i matti.
La Scomessa, Act III., Sc. IV. — (Desiderio.). Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 316.

Learning

“As a little child, I remember having conflicts with other people over religion at 5-years-old, at 8-years-old, and without realising it. Certainly, not realising my whole life would be this whole argument. I would ask simple questions to my babysitter when I was a little boy, like, “How does Jesus turn water into wine? I know water is H2O. I know that wine is alcohol and fruit juice, and I don’t know what the chemical components of that are.” But as it turned out, when I grew up I looked it up. It is only the difference of a carbon atom. The molecules are much more complex. But they involve oxygen, hydrogen, and some additional carbons. That’s it. But all I knew at the time, water is H2O, and alcohol and fruit juice are something else. How does Jesus turn water from H2O into H2O and whatever else? I thought someone would give me some kind of intelligible answer. Like how Jesus does that, whether he uses telekinesis or whatever he does… But they don’t come up with explanations like that, they didn’t want explanations. They didn’t even want to believe people had explanations. When I was growing up, I found believers not only hated accurate scientific answers, but they hated any answer that sounded scientific. It was a funny thing. I was told all of the time that “sceptics were cynics” because we miss out on the big picture that only the believers can see.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

Life, Hate, People, Alcohol

“Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.”

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) American musician, poet

Preface to The Science of English Verse 1880

“Providence shows no mercy to weak nations, but recognizes the right of existence-only of sound and strong nations…This Jewish bolshevist annihilation of nations and its western European and American procurers can be met only in one way: by using every ounce of strength with the extreme fanaticism and stubborn steadfastness that merciful God gives to men in hard times for the defense of their own lives…We have suffered so much that it only steels us to fanatical resolve to hate Our enemies a thousand times more and to regard them for what they are destroyers of an eternal culture and annihilators of humanity. Out of this hate a holy will is born to oppose these destroyers of our existence with all the strength that God has given us and to crush them in the end. During its 2,000-year history our people has survived so many terrible times that we have no doubt that we will also master our present plight.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech on the 25th Anniversary of the Announcement of the National Socialist Party's Program http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adolf-hitler-speech-on-the-25th-anniversary-of-the-announcement-of-the-national-socialist-party-s-program-february-1945 (February 24, 1945) 1940s

Men, God, Hate, People

“Every night, at exactly a quarter past three, something dreadful happens on the street outside our bedroom window. We peek through the curtains, yawning and shivering in the life-draining chill, and then we clamber back beneath the blankets without exchanging a word, to hug each other tightly and hope for sound sleep before it's time to rise.

Usually what we witness verges on the mundane. Drunken young men fighting, swaying about with outstretched knives, cursing incoherently. Robbery, bashings, rape. We wince to see such violence, but we can hardly be shocked or surprised any more, and we're never tempted to intervene: it's always far too cold, for a start! A single warm exhalation can coat the window pane with mist, transforming the most stomach-wrenching assault into a safely cryptic ballet for abstract blobs of light.

On some nights, though, when the shadows in the room are subtly wrong, when the familiar street looks like an abandoned film set, or a painting of itself perversely come to life, we are confronted by truly disturbing sights, oppressive apparitions which almost make us doubt we're awake, or, if awake, sane. I can't catalogue these visions, for most, mercifully, are blurred by morning, leaving only a vague uneasiness and a reluctance to be alone even in the brightest sunshine.”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

Scatter My Ashes http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/SCATTER/Scatter.html, published in Interzone (Spring 1988) Fiction

Life, Men, Hope, Sleep

“A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent, without giving any sound.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

John Calvin, quoted in The Westminster Collection of Christian Quotations (2001) by Martin H. Manser, p. 56
Misattributed

God, Truth, Dogs

“... the clock
Was placed where full the sun-beams fell;—what deep,
Simple morality spoke in those hands,
Going their way in silence, till a sound,
Solemn and sweet, made their appeal to Time,
And the hour spoke its only warning!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Way, Silence, Time, Sun

“Most houses grossly violate the basic principles of natural summer cooling and sound winter heating.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Nature, Winter, Summer, Housing

“I remember being awakened one morning by voices in the room where I slept. There was a whizzing sound which made itself heard between the voices now and then. It was the sound of spinning-wheels, and the voices were those of women spinning and carding wool. The dust of the room danced in a ray of sunshine which shone through the high narrow window that lighted the room..”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Quote, c. 1870; as cited by Julia Cartwright in Jean Francois Millet, his Life and Letters, Swan Sonnenschein en Co, Lim. London / The Macmillian Company, New York; second edition, September 1902, p. 12
taken from Millet's youth-memories, he wrote down on request of his friend and later biographer Alfred Sensier, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sensier]
1870 - 1875

Women, Light, Dance

“It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity,—Necessity will make him submit,—but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;—that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Wisdom, God, World, Law

“A scorching blast of golden fire as it slowly leaves the ground
Tears away with a mighty force
The air is shattered by the awesome sound
-- Countdown (1982)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Tear

“Sy Safransky: “Didn’t taking the name “Adyashanti” reinforce a certain sense that you are an enlightened holy man?”
Adyashanti: “Oh, absolutely it did. It’s sort of a ridiculous-sounding Eastern name. (…) I always tell people to call me “Adya,” and leave the “shanti” part off.””

Adyashanti (1962) Spiritual teacher

Interview for The Sun Magazine (2007)

People, Sense, Parting

“For the student of visionary art the interesting fact is that an image comes first and takes up residence in the mind long before the artist has any notion why it is there or what it means. Whether visions come from some great reservoir of symbolic images which are eternally there (and if one examines the recurrence of images in history this proposition is not quite as crazy as it sounds) or whether they are due to buried memories, their obsessive power over an artist's mind, and their clear, compulsive emergence in his work depends on a mental condition that can come and go. When, for some reason, they no longer present themselves to the mind's eye, alive or clamoring to be born, the visionary artist has a hard time — dark days. This is particularly true if he has lost the habit of feeding his mind on the observation of nature.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 6: Blake

Art, History, Nature, Memory

“If the fork is not removed when the spider has arrived it seems to have the same charm as any fly: for the spider seizes it, embraces it, and runs about on the legs of the fork as often as it is made to sound, never seeming to learn by experience that other things may buzz besides its natural food.”

C. V. Boys (1855–1944) British physicist

[Boys, C. V., 16 December 1880, The influence of a tuning-fork on the garden spider, Nature, 23, 149–150, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012106640;view=1up;seq=177]

Food, Nature, Learning, Flying

“Sing louder around
To the bells' cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the ecchoing green.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Ecchoing Green, st. 1
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Sport, Singing

“A number of great factories in the hands of rich capitalists, in which "slaves of work" drag out their miserable existence, is not, therefore, the goal of the development of the age of natural science, but a return to individual labour, or where the nature of things demands it, the carrying on of common workshops by unions of workmen, who will receive a sound basis only through the general extension of knowledge and civilization, and through the possibility of obtaining cheaper capital.”

Werner von Siemens (1816–1892) German inventor and industrialist

D. Appleton., (1887). The Popular Science Monthly, Volume 30.

Age, Nature, Knowledge, Science

“I got a phone call from Ricky Martin's management asking me if I'd like to do something with him in Florida around the winter music conference. My answer is as follows: 'I would consider doing something with Ricky Martin if and only if he publicly apologizes for performing at George W's inauguration and if he confirms that when he danced next to George W. Bush at the inauguration he could smell brimstone and that George W. Bush is in fact the spawn of Satan. So if Ricky Martin goes on national television to confirm that George W. is the spawn of Satan then I will perform with him. Otherwise no deal. And only if we can do a cover of 'In a Gadda-da-vida', but The Simpsons version, 'In the garden of Eden' (to which reverend Lovejoy responds ""that sounds like rock and or roll""). And, by the way, I'm a pretty easygoing young-ish person, so if you ever see me walking down the street just stop me and say hello. We're all in the same boat, right? of course you'll have to make it past my phalanx of security guards who are all ex-NFL linebackers, and the cadre of dobermans, and the perma-moat that I wear that's filled with electric eels and vicious sea monkeys. So if you see me just come and say hi. I'm normal.”

Moby (1965) Activist, American musician, DJ and photographer

"predictions" http://www.moby.com/journal/2001-02-15/predictions.html, journal entry (15 February 2001) at Moby's website, moby.com http://www.moby.com/

Music, Way, Winter, Past

“From the start, the prose in my Hank books copied the storytelling techniques of ranchers and cowboys, which means it was heavily influenced by an oral tradition. It was a natural and easy step to move from reading my stories aloud to audiences in Perryton, to recording them in a studio in Amarillo. The Hank audios have the feel of the radio programs I listened to in the fifties: character voices, background music, and sound effects.”

John R. Erickson (1942) American author

John R. Erickson on the discipline of writing, the world of publishing, and (of course) dogs http://www.lonestarliterary.com/john-r.-erickson-061415.html (June 14, 2015)

Books, Music, Feeling, Nature

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere… God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Source: Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 191

God, Reading

“The announcers sounded giddily excited. Their faces flushed, their eyes bright. Natural disasters did that to people, made them feel significant, reassured them that their actions mattered.”

Michael Swanwick book Stations of the Tide

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 12, “Across the Ancient Causeway” (p. 223)

People, Feeling, Nature

“Most game music today sounds quite predictable, generic and boring and that is, in my opinion, one of the biggest problems with game music today.”

Jesper Kyd (1972) musician

Teamxbox, Audiophile interview, 2003

Music, Game, Problem

“Conceptual Art is a sounding instrument between printed words, luminous writings, and letters scrawled in a hasty nervous instinctive calligraphy.”

Mario Merz (1925–2003) Italian artist, painter and sculptor

Quoted in Kristine Stiles & Peter Howard Selz: Theories and documents of contemporary art (1996), p. 671

Art

“Taupe? What sort of colour is "taupe"? It sounds like a Malaysian ground sloth encountered once every fifty years by one of the Attenboroughs wearing long socks.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Storey
8 1/2 Women

“With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.”

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

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.

Communication, Idea, Sense

“The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

12 February 1851; compare the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson, "Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) by James Boswell.
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Love

“Howdy! That's a great question, actually. The reason we fart is due to needing to periodically release gases that build up during digestion. During the digestion process of the foods you eat, naturally occurring beneficial bacteria in your body metabolize (i. e. convert the food in your body to useable energy) and produce waste as a result, some of which is the gas that makes up farts. This is typically where the methane (CH4) in farts comes from, the rest of the fart volume being from air swallowed during the course of the day. For animals like spiders and insects, there are similar processes! Some animals like termites, for example, better match us as they, too, have methane-producing bacteria in their guts which helps them break down wood! For other animals, other digestive processes make waste products and sometimes gas, so yes, spiders (and insects) do fart, in a sense! Since their exoskeletons are generally rigid, though, they may not produce the sound we associate with farting, thus, you might say that most spider and insect farts are "silent but deadly!"”

Ben Eisenkop (1986) American biologist and redditor

Posted https://www.reddit.com/r/UnidanFans/comments/1mubgx/q_for_unidan_from_my_8yo_daughter_do_spiders_fart/cccqton in response to "Do spiders fart?" (2013)

Food, Question, Nature, Sense

“This is going to sound really weird, but I never had a desire to be famous. I never had huge ambitions — never.”

Kate Winslet (1975) English actress and singer

Isn’t She Deneuvely?: Vanity Fair, Dec 2008 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/12/winslet200812

“I for my part still conceive it to be the paramount duty of a British member of parliament to consider what is good for Great Britain…I do not envy that man's feelings, who can behold the sufferings of Switzerland, and who derives from that sight no idea of what is meant by the deliverance of Europe. I do not envy the feelings of that man, who can look without emotion at Italy – plundered, insulted, trampled upon, exhausted, covered with ridicule, and horror, and devastation – who can look at all this, and be at a loss to guess what is meant by the deliverance of Europe? As little do I envy the feelings of that man, who can view the peoples of the Netherlands driven into insurrection, and struggling for their freedom against the heavy hand of a merciless tyranny, without entertaining any suspicion of what may be the sense of the word deliverance. Does such a man contemplate Holland groaning under arbitrary oppressions and exactions? Does he turn his eyes to Spain trembling at the nod of a foreign master? And does the word deliverance still sound unintelligibly in his ear? Has he heard of the rescue and salvation of Naples, by the appearance and the triumphs of the British fleet? Does he know that the monarchy of Naples maintains its existence at the sword's point? And is his understanding, and his heart, still impenetrable to the sense and meaning of the deliverance of Europe?”

George Canning (1770–1827) British statesman and politician

Speech in 1798, quoted in Wendy Hinde, George Canning (London: Purnell Books Services, 1973), p. 66.

People, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“I started writing instrumentals but Roma pointed out they were very visual, so she started writing lyrics.. and Nicky had this idea of creating a wall of sound and started multi-tracking my voice.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

The Times Magazine interview (2005)

Idea

“A good sonnet appears to be a confession-in a word either patently artificial, and then it is bad, or good, then it sounds like autobiography.”

George Lyman Kittredge (1860–1941) American scholar, literary critic, and folklorist

The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1936. Chap XI

Appearance

“O lay me, ye that see the light, near some rock of my hills! let the thick hazels be around, let the rustling oak be near. Green be the place of my rest; let the sound of the distant torrent be heard. Daughter of Toscar, take the harp, and raise the lovely song of Selma, that sleep may overtake my soul in the midst of joy; that the dreams of my youth may return, and the days of the mighty Fingal.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"The War of Inis-thona"
The Poems of Ossian

Love, Youth, Dreams, Soul

“An-Nu'man ibn Bashir said, "I heard the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, say, "The halal is clear and the haram is clear. But between the two there are doubtful things about which most people have no knowledge. Whoever exercises caution with regard to what is doubtful, shows prudence in respect of his deen and his honour. Whoever gets involved in the doubtful things is like a herdsman who grazes his animals near a private preserve (hima). He is bound to enter it. Every king has a private preserve and the private preserve of Allah on His earth are the things that He has made forbidden. There is lump of flesh in the body, the nature of which is that when it is sound, the entire body is sound, and when it is corrupt, the entire body is corrupt - it is the heart."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 4, hadith number 588
Sunni Hadith

People, Peace, Exercises, Nature

“I bet you anything I could destroy Milton Friedman in a debate about economics — so long as the audience was comprised of five year olds. He may have a Nobel Prize, but I can make offensive sounds with my armpit. Advantage: Goldberg!”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

July 19, 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040421/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200407190837.asp 2000s, 2004

“The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

December 27, 1857
Journals (1838-1859)

Disease, Dogs, Music, Dependency

“You got through a day and wondered what your reward was. It soon became evident the prize was you got to withstand tomorrow too. You got through it, hour by long hour, but at the end you looked up without much expectation. You had begun the understand the score. Sure enough: today's prize was the same. Outwardly calm, but with a scream building like the sound of a long-forgotten steam engine in the back corner of a basement, you got through that tomorrow too, and a flat hardpan of further tomorrows after that. You got through enough of then to realize you'd been had, that there aren't tomorrows after all but the wretched stretch of an endless today. What can you do? Rebellion gets you nowhere.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 21

Understanding

“What, then, is the good of this "protection"? Why, the country have come to regard it, as they regard witchcraft, as a mere sound and a delusion. They no more regard your precautions against free trade, than they regard the horse-shoes that are nailed over the stables to keep the witches away from the horses.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1846/feb/27/commercial-policy-customs-corn-laws in the House of Commons (27 February 1846). 1840s

Shoe, Horse, Country

“Petals are a plant’s eardrum. Distant sounds make them quiver like the needle of a seismograph.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

Distant

“I wanted to find out why Shelley could write better-sounding poetry than I.”

Peter Ladefoged (1925–2006) British phonetician

Los Angeles Times (1970); on why he chose to pursue phonetics.

“She hurried at his words, beset with fears,
For there were sleeping dragons all around,
At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears —
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found. —
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain-droop’d lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
Flutter’d in the besieging wind’s uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.”

John Keats The Eve of St. Agnes

Stanza 40
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

Fear, Way, Sleep, Housing

“All agree that under the Constitution slavery in the States is beyond the reach of any human power except that of the respective States themselves wherein it exists. May we not, then, hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end, and that the geographical parties to which it has given birth, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, will speedily become extinct? Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance. Throughout the whole progress of this agitation, which has scarcely known any intermission for more than twenty years, whilst it has been productive of no positive good to any human being it has been the prolific source of great evils to the master, to the slave, and to the whole country. It has alienated and estranged the people of the sister States from each other, and has even seriously endangered the very existence of the Union. Nor has the danger yet entirely ceased. Under our system there is a remedy for all mere political evils in the sound sense and sober judgment of the people. Time is a great corrective. Political subjects which but a few years ago excited and exasperated the public mind have passed away and are now nearly forgotten. But this question of domestic slavery is of far graver importance than any mere political question, because should the agitation continue it may eventually endanger the personal safety of a large portion of our countrymen where the institution exists. In that event no form of government, however admirable in itself and however productive of material benefits, can compensate for the loss of peace and domestic security around the family altar. Let every Union-loving man, therefore, exert his best influence to suppress this agitation, which since the recent legislation of Congress is without any legitimate object.”

James Buchanan (1791–1868) American politician, 15th President of the United States (in office from 1857 to 1861)

Inaugural address (4 March 1857).

Love, People, Family, Peace

““I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just… very different.”
“Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.””

Octavia E. Butler book Dawn

Part III “Nursery” chapter 12 (p. 186).
Dawn (1987)

Understanding, Animals

“Almost sounds like Bigfoot doesn't it?”

George Noory (1950) Talk Radio Host

December 15, 2004, while listening to a caller's dog howling on-air

““The rest of the materials inside your submarine must have floated—must have flown around! What did you think?”
“Some people,” Lebret confessed, “suggested poltergeists.”
“Poltergeists!” Dakkar’s huge face registered astonishment. “Are you all idiots?”
“It was a chaotic time,” said Lebret, weakly.
“Poltergeists!” repeated Dakkar, disbelievingly. “I was certain it would be scientists who responded to my message! Instead they have sent down a clutch of gullible mystics and table-rappers!” He sounded genuinely disgusted.”

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 24, “Dakkar” (p. 228)

People, Thinking, Time

“One thing has struck me as a bit queer. During my two terms of office the whole Democratic press, and the morbidly honest and 'reformatory' portion of the Republican press, thought it horrible to keep U. S. troops stationed in the Southern States, and when they were called upon to protect the lives of negroes– as much citizens under the Constitution as if their skins were white– the country was scarcely large enough to hold the sound of indignation belched forth by them for some years. Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens. All parties agree that this is right, and so do I. If a negro insurrection should arise in South Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or if the negroes in either of these states, where they are in a large majority, should intimidate the whites from going to the polls, or from exercising any of the rights of American citizens, there would be no division of sentiment as to the duty of the president. It does seem the rule should work both ways.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Regarding keeping U.S. Army soldiers stationed in southern U.S. states to protect the safety and civil rights of freed slaves (26 August 1877), as quoted in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant: November 1, 1876-September 30, 1878, by U.S. Grant, pp. 251-252.
1870s, Letter to Daniel Ammen (1877)

Way, Exercises, Country

“A more structured connection with the mass is needed, and we must improve it in the course of the coming years. But as far as initiatives originating in the upper strata of the government are concerned, we are currently utilizing the almost intuitive method of sounding out general reactions to the great problems we confront.
In this Fidel is a master. His own special way of fusing himself with the people can be appreciated only by seeing him in action. At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

People, Way, Problem, Victory

“Much brass has been sounded and many cymbals tinkled in the name of advertising; but the advertisements which persuade people to act are written by men who have an abiding respect for the intelligence of their readers, and a deep sincerity regarding the merits of the goods they have to sell.”

Bruce Fairchild Barton book The Man Nobody Knows

Source: The Man Nobody Knows (1924), Ch. 5 : His Advertisements

Men, People, Intelligence, Sincerity

“Technological progress — and it is a pity more do not appreciate it — is the one sound approach to increased employment and higher wages. There is no other way. Irrespective of what is being said to the contrary, new industries can be created, present industries can be expanded, unemployment can be eliminated in a practical way”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 10; Published earlier in: Drugs, Oils & Paints, (1939). Vol. 54-55, p. 335

Way

“New Song rapidly accumulated a nucleus of talent, and its best-known group was Els Setze Jutges, The Sixteen Judges, whose odd-sounding name came from a phrase used as a password by Catalan patriot troops during the rising against and occupation army in 1640 during the Reapers' War: "Setze jutges d'un jutjat menjen fetge d'un penjat" ("Sixteen judges on a tribunal eat the liver of a hanged man"). No lisping Castilian, it was believed, could pronounce this barrage of fricatives.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Page 11
Barcelona (1992)

War

“It's like in golf. A lot of people — I don't want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It's weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can't sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

After Roasting, Trump Reacts In Character
2011-05-01
New York Times
Michael
Barbaro
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/nyregion/after-roasting-trump-reacts-in-character.html
2011-05-06
on his opposition to same-sex marriage
2010s, 2011

Hate, People

“I heard the quotation read in a summary of the speech. I thought the words sounded familiar and suddenly it dawned on me that they were out of my little book.”

Minnie Haskins (1875–1957) British poet and sociologist

Her reaction on hearing her poem. Daily Telegraph, 16 Aug 2008 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/3561497/At-the-Gate-of-the-Year.html

Books, Reading

“No less incommensurable with the working-world than the philosophical question is the sound of true poetry. […] The lover, too, stands outside the tight chain of efficiency of this working world, and [so does] whoever else approaches the margin of existence through some deep existential disturbance (which always brings a "shattering" of one's environment), or through, say, the proximity of death.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 67–68

Death, World, Lovers, Question

“Replacing particles by strings is a naive-sounding step, from which many other things follow. In fact, replacing Feynman graphs by Riemann surfaces has numerous consequences: 1. It eliminates the infinities from the theory. …2. It greatly reduces the number of possible theories. …3. It gives the first hint that string theory will change our notions of spacetime. Just as in QCD, so also in gravity, many of the interesting questions cannot be answered in perturbation theory. In string theory, to understand the nature of the Big Bang, or the quantum fate of a black hole, or the nature of the vacuum state that determines the properties of the elementary particles, requires information beyond perturbation theory… Perturbation theory is not everything. It is just the way the [string] theory was discovered.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

"The Past and Future of String Theory" in The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's Contributions to Physics (2003) ed. G.W. Gibbons, E.P.S. Shellard & S.J. Rankin

Fate, Way, Understanding, Question

“Americanization having its roots in political ideals cannot be achieved so long as these ideals, as interpreted by the sources of authority in America, mean one thing for the native-born and another thing for the foreign-born; one thing for men and another for women; one thing for employers and another for employees; one thing for the rich and another for the poor; one thing in one State and another thing in an adjoining State. No American who hopes for national unity can spend too much time insisting upon the most painstaking interpretation of the guarantees of American law, even though it takes him into such technical matters as interpreter service, cost of appeals, discriminatory laws, and race prejudices. Every support of a sound Americanism is strong or weak according as justice is done or not done.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Women, Men, Justice, Law

“No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

1990s, 1991-94

People

“There is a world of visual beauty open to the one willing to undergo the practice and striving necessary to the understanding of its language.
This world is a important as culturally as is the world of words or of music. My ideal is to form and to paint as Schubert sings his songs and as Beethoven creates his world in sounds. That is to say, creation of one’s own inner world through the same human and artistic discipline.
An inner sensation can find external expression only through spiritual realization.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 58
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

World, Beauty, Music, Understanding

“The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence — and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark.”

Carl David Anderson (1905–1991) American scientist

As quoted in Carl Anderson. Some notes about his life and work at Caltech. The first of a series of biographical sketches of Caltech faculty members. Engineering and Science, Vol. 15:1 (October 1951) http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechES:15.1.0

Study

“He is a noble gentleman; withal
Happy in his endeavours: the general voice
Sounds him for courtesy, behaviour, language,
And every fair demeanour, an example:
Titles of honour add not to his worth;
Who is himself an honour to his title.”

John Ford (dramatist) (1586–1639) dramatist

Act I, sc. iii.
The Lady's Trial (1638)

Happiness

“My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

The Rolling Stone Interview: Bob Dylan http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-talks-a-raw-and-extensive-first-rolling-stone-interview-19691129 (29 November 1969)

Personality

“Part of the unknown reality, then, is hidden beneath language and the enforced pattern of accustomed words-so, for an exercise, look about your environment. Make up new, different 'words' for the objects that you see about you. Pick up any object, for example. Hold it for a few seconds, feel its texture, look at its color, and spontaneously give it a new name by uttering the sounds that come into your mind. See how the sounds bring out certain aspects of the object that you may not have noticed before. The new word will fit as much as the old one did. It may, in fact, fit better. Do this with many objects, following the same procedure. You can instead say the name of any object backwards. In such ways you break up to some extent the automatic patterning of familiar phrases, so that you can perceive the individuality that is within each object.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 726, p. 460
The “Unknown” Reality: Volume Two, (1979)

Color, Way, Feeling, Exercises

“And I got some other producers I’m working with right now. I got YK 808, I got Deedotwill, I got other up-and-coming artists. I stay working with different people. I like overlapping and vibing with different producers, and that’s just how I’ve always been, man. Even when I was with Three 6 Mafia. I used to always just search for new talent and work with new talented people. I just think that’s what it is. I love making music. I don’t like to stay in the same place -- I’m not that type of person. But I still keep my roots. I still keep my sound.”

Juicy J (1975) American rapper and record producer from Tennessee; co-founder of Three 6 Mafia

Juicy J Interview Rubba band Business Wiz Khalifa Juicy J https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/8070920/juicy-j-interview-rubba-band-business-wiz-khalifa

Love, People, Music, Search

“The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 11 (p. 149)

Faith

“The name was a fluke. A joke. It started when I was doing A Christmas Carol in San Diego. We'd sit backstage and talk about names we'd never give our children, like Pork Pie or Independence. Of course, now people are walking around with those names. A woman said to me, "If I was your mother, I would have called you Whoopi, because when you're unhappy you make a sound like a whoopee cushion. It sounds like a fart." It was like "Ha-ha-ha-ha—Whoopi!" So people actually started calling me Whoopi Cushion. After about a year, my mother said, "You won't be taken seriously if you call yourself Whoopi Cushion. So try this combination: Whoopi Goldberg.”

Whoopi Goldberg (1955) American actress

Playboy interview, Playboy magazine, June 1988

Children, People, Christmas

“My experience of the original Edison phonograph goes back to the period when it was first introduced into this country. In fact, I have good reason to believe that I was among the very first persons in London to make a vocal record, though I never received a copy of it, and if I did it got lost long ago. It must have been in 1881 or 1882, and the place where the deed was done was on the first floor of a shop in Hatton Garden, where I had been invited to listen to the wonderful new invention. To begin with, I heard pieces both in song and speech produced by the friction of a needle against a revolving cylinder, or spool, fixed in what looked like a musical box. It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct.”

Herman Klein (1856–1934) British musical critic journalist and singing teacher

The Gramophone magazine, December 1933

Music, Singing, Time, Personality

“I would have the musicians keep playing over and over again till the sound made sense. I worked overtime on that; I worked hours to get it right. If the sound didn't make any sense, then I wouldn't know what to do — I'd be lost! It's instinct that tells me. I have an instinct for music, or a feeling about it, and I'll have my feelings guide my hands.”

Brian Wilson (1942) American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer

Bassics interview (1999)

Music, Feeling, Sense

“One time I was in the men's room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, "I don't like your face. I think I'll push it in."I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, "Get out of my way, or I'll pee right through ya!"”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Part 4: "From Cornell to Caltech, With a Touch of Brazil", "Any Questions?", p. 177
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Men, Way, Guy, Thinking

“Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Life, Music

“The senses (the organs of sight, sound, taste, smell, temperature, and touch) are the guardians of the body, and whatever appears good to these sentinels is instantly desired, and ordinarily such things tend to the preservation and furtherance of the welfare of the body, but we choose them simply because they appear pleasing and not for ulterior ends.”

Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) President of Northwestern university and psychologist

Source: The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice, 1908, p. 154

Sense, Appearance

“I have to go away, but with regrets and with the firm intention to come back soon. I consider most sound I am an individual Gorky – and it is my individual feeling which counts for the most. Why? I do not know nor do I wish to know. I accept it as a fact, which does not need explanation.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 170: Gorky's quote in a letter to his future wife Agnes Magruder (Mougouch), 31 Mai 1941

Feeling

“There is one sound way a man can bind a woman to him, the same way she will bind him, and with the same rope.”

Tanith Lee book Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Book One, Part III “White Lynx”, Chapter 2 (pp. 93-94)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Way

“Even as the light that shifts and plays upon a lake, when Cynthia looks forth from heaven or the bright wheel of Phoebus in mid course passes by, so doth he shed a gleam upon the waters; he heeds not the shadow of the Nymph or her hair or the sound of her as she rises to embrace him. Greedily casting her arms about him, as he calls, alack! too late for help and utters the name of his mighty friend, she draws him down; for her strength is aided by his falling weight.”
Stagna vaga sic luce micant ubi Cynthia caelo prospicit aut medii transit rota candida Phoebi, tale iubar diffundit aquis: nil umbra comaeque turbavitque sonus surgentis ad oscula nymphae. illa avidas iniecta manus heu sera cientem auxilia et magni referentem nomen amici detrahit, adiutae prono nam pondere vires.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book III, Lines 558–564

Light, Water, Help, Drawing

“Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce … That would be sad. If two people were married and they were really and they just had a great thing and then they got divorced, that would be really sad. But that has happened zero times.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://splitsider.com/2013/02/the-annotated-wisdom-of-louis-c-k/

Marriage, People, Sadness, Time

“Whenever you look, God is there. But is He a rock or a stone or a sun or a moon or a bone? No. His sound is there and His warnings are there. You can see Him. You can see His sound, His words, His speech. You can listen to the commandments given to the prophets, because they have not gone away. They are within us.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

God, Sun

“Since I’ve basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I’m not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available to more people is great. MP3 files sound cruddy, but a well-made album sounds great. And I don’t care what anyone says about digital recordings. At this point they are good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do. … I’m looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I’m not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to. It’s a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system.”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

From "Courtney Love does the math", a speech given on the corruption of the music industry, from Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ (14 June 2000) 1996–2005

People, Music, Help, Dance

“What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?”

Alphonse de Lamartine book Méditations poétiques

Méditations Poétiques (1820), Second series, Sermon 15

Life, Death, Success

“Conservatives — or better, pro-corporate apologists — hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right … This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove — the reputed brain of George W. Bush — as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.”

Bill Moyers (1934) American journalist

Speech to the "Take Back America" Conference (10 June 2003) http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wjs/BillMoyersSpeech.htm; "Degenerate and unlovely age" is a quotation from Charles Eliot Norton

Age

“Yet spirit immortal, the tomb can not bind thee,
But like thine own eagle that soars to the sun
Thou springest from bondage and leavest behind thee
A name which before thee no mortal hath won.
Tho' nations may combat, and war's thunders rattle,
No more on thy steed wilt thou sweep o’er the plain:
Thou sleep'st thy last sleep, thou hast fought thy last battle,
No sound can awake thee to glory again.”

Lyman Heath (1804–1870) American musician

The Grave of Bonaparte, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919) (incorrectly attributed as "Leonard" Heath).

War, Sleep, Sun

“The sound rule in business is that you may give money freely when you have a surplus, but your name never—neither as endorser nor as member of a corporation with individual liability”

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) American businessman and philanthropist

Source: Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, 1920, Chapter XVI

Money

“Basically, the whole thing of the project is to take it back to my old sound, the old DJ Paul sound. Before Three 6 Mafia when I was just DJ Paul and it was just me and my brother Lord Infamous. It was like a mix of songs and it was either me or members of my crew and some of it would be my signature “Crunkstrumentals” which would be instrumentals with crunk chants and sampled hooks and this and that on it. I brought those back a little bit on my last album Yots (Year Of The Six) Pt. 2 that dropped last quarter of last year, 2016. So, there will be more of those on there, like I said it’s just the original OG Paul sound that’s what the fans been asking for and I see that what a lot of people are back into these days, there using that old three six sounds and a lot of people are sampling it and clear samples from me. They sampled the creator it takes the king to bring it back himself. I never left it alone, to be honest with you, but I just didn’t do full albums of it. It would just be a track on my albums or mixtapes, not a single but this whole Volume 17 mixtape is going to be like that.”

DJ Paul (1977) American rapper and record producer

Interview with Three 6 Mafia Founder DJ Paul http://therapfest.com/behind-lyrics-interview-three-6-mafias-founder-dj-paul/

People

“the reality beyond language is not completely reality, a reality that does not speak or say is not reality;
and the moment I say that, the moment I write, letter by letter, that a reality stripped of names is not reality, the names evaporate, they are air, they are a sound encased in another sound and in another and another, a murmur, a faint cascade of meanings that fade away to nothingness:
the tree that I say is not the tree that I see, tree does not say tree, the tree is beyond its name, a leafy, woody reality: impenetrable, untouchable, a reality beyond signs, immersed in itself, firmly planted in its own reality: I can touch it but I cannot name it, I can set fire to it but if I name it I dissolve it:
the tree that is there among the trees is not the tree that I name but a reality that is beyond names, beyond the word reality, it is simply reality just as it is, the abolition of differences and also the abolition of similarities;
the tree that I name is not the tree, and the other one, the one that I do not name and that is there, on the other side of my window, its trunk now black and its foliage still inflamed by the setting sun, is not the tree either, but, rather, the inaccessible reality in which it is planted:
between the one and the other there appears the single tree of sensation which is the perception of the sensation of tree that is vanishing, but
who perceives, who senses, who vanishes as sensations and perceptions vanish?”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

Reality, Sense, Tree, Appearance

“The tender Evenlode that makes
Her meadows hush to hear the sound
Of waters mingling in the brakes,
And binds my heart to English ground.A lovely river, all alone,
She lingers in the hills and holds
A hundred little towns of stone,
Forgotten in the western wolds.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"Dedicatory Ode", stanzas 31–32
Verses (1910)

Love, Water, Heart

“Sound is defined as the result of a succession of regular and periodic vibrations. Noise is instead caused by motions that are irregular, as much in time as in intensity. 'A musical sensation,' says Helmholtz 'appears to the ear as a perfectly stable, uniform, and invariable sound.' But the quality of continuity that sound has with respect to noise, which seems instead fragmentary and irregular, is not an element sufficient to make a sharp distinction between sound and noise. We know that the production of sound requires not only that a body vibrate regularly but also that these vibrations persist in the auditory nerve until the following vibration has arrived, so that the periodic vibrations blend to form a continuous musical sound. At least sixteen vibrations per second are needed for this. Now, if I succeed in producing a noise with this speed. I will get a sound made up of the totality of so many noises--or better, noise whose successive repetitions will be sufficiently rapid to give a sensation of continuity like that of sound.”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Russolo. English trans. Barclay Brown (1986: 37).
undated quotes

Music, Appearance, Time, Success

“It was in November 1919 that I made my first contact with The Tibetan… I heard what I thought was a clear note of music which sounded from the sky, through the hill and in me. Then I heard a voice which said, "There are some books which it is desired should be written for the public. You can write them. Will you do so?" Without a moment's notice I said, "Certainly not. I'm not a darned psychic and I don't want to be drawn into anything like that." I was startled to hear myself speaking out loud. The voice went on to say that wise people did not make snap judgments, that I had a peculiar gift for the higher telepathy and that what I was being asked to do embodied no aspect of the lower psychism. I replied that I didn't care, that I wasn't interested in any work of a psychic nature at all. The unseen person who was speaking so clearly and directly to me then said that he would give me time for consideration; that he would not take my answer then and that he would come back in three weeks' time exactly, to find out what I intended to do.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter IV - Part 2

People, Books, Music, Nature

“When you fell in the sea, you should have heard them cheer. I made them rope the yard and fish you up. I said a ducking in water washes the witch-skill out of a woman until next full moon, and it would be bad luck to let you drown. How about that for a clever story? They’d believe anything if you make it sound silly enough.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Short fiction, The Winter Players (1976), Chapter 3, “Red Ship” (p. 136)

Bad luck, Fish, Water, Sea

“Those numbers ay not sound like a bid deal until one reflects that average global temperatures were "only" 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

About global warming. Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "The most serious problems" (Penguin Books, 2011, page 493, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

Age

“J. Lo's new song 'Jenny From the Block', all about Lopez' roots. About how she's still a neighborhood gal at heart. But folks from that street in New York, the Bronx section, sound more likely to give her a curb job than a blow job. Or, uh. A block party. […] Sorry about that slip-up there. I have no idea how that happened, but it won't happen again. And that's your news and the G Block as Fox reports this Monday, November the 4th, 2002.”

Shepard Smith (1964) television news anchor from the United States

"The G Block" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra7MTconlEE (November 4, 2002), Fox Report, Fox News. As quoted in "Trading places" https://web.archive.org/web/20140820072850/http://www.salon.com/2002/11/12/nptues_108/ (November 12, 2002), by Amy Reiter, Salon, Salon Media Group, Inc. 2000s

Idea, Heart

Quotes about sound page 13

Quotes about sound
page 13