Quotes about tonic (28 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Freedom (1908)
Source: Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes

Age , Solitude , Freedom , Wine

“Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Madness

“I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.”

Alban Berg (1885–1935) Austrian composer

Quoted in Reich, Willi (1971). Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, p. 34. Translated by Leo Black.

Law , Music , Way , Thinking

“In Western Australia they don't even know how to make that vital piece of sailing-boat equipment, the gin and tonic.”

P. J. O'Rourke book Holidays in Hell

Holidays in Hell (1989)

“There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.”

Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American writer

Hope , Powerful , Hope

“The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Winter Dreams

Source: Winter Dreams

“Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.”

Stephen Fry book Moab Is My Washpot

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

Smile , Sex

“The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I must have told my story ill if to every physician who hears me its illustrations have not the invigorating force of moral tonics.”

Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) American physician

Transaction of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1887, 9: 337, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Dwelling beside a body of water is tonic for the weary psyche. Sea smells, sea birds, seawrack, sands—alternately cool, warm, moist and dry—a taste of brine and the presence of the rocking, slopping bluegraygreen spit-flecked waters, has the effect of rinsing the emotions, bathing the outlook, bleaching the conscience.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 119-120)

Bird , Water , Sea

“In f-major, c* [a C major chord] is a sonority contained within the overtones of the tonic f”

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) French composer and music theorist of the Baroque era

a F major chord
ibid, p. 14.

“It has been calculated that ninety-three million women in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and therefore, their souls, by Pemberton's creams and lotions for saving the same; and that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties is obtained in Pemberton's tonics and blood-builders and women's specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as especially tasty and stimulating.”

Sinclair Lewis book The Job

The Job (1917)

Women , Alcohol , World , Soul

“Furthermore, it must be mentioned that there are not petitional or intercessory prayers in Buddhism. However much we may pray to the Buddha we cannot be saved. The Buddha does not grant favors to those who pray to Him. Instead of petitional prayers there is meditation that leads to self-control, purification and enlightenment. Meditation is neither a silent reverie nor keeping the mind blank. It is an active striving. It serves as a tonic both to the heart and the mind. The Buddha not only speaks of the futility of offering prayers but also disparages a slave mentality. A Buddhist should not pray to be saved, but should rely on himself and win his freedom.”

Narada Maha Thera (1898–1983) Sri Lankan monk and missionary

Buddhism in a Nutshell

Freedom , Heart

“It's nine o' clock on a Saturday
Regular crowd shuffles in
There's an old man sitting next to me
Making love to his tonic and gin.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Piano Man.
Song lyrics, Piano Man (1973)

Love , Making love

“As to abuse, I thrive on it. Abuse, hearty abuse, is a tonic to all save men of indifferent health.”

Norman Douglas (1868–1952) British writer

Some Limericks (1928).

Men , Health , Indifference

“Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

Hell

“In the passage quoted here from Monteverdi's madrigal [Cruda amarilli, mm.9-19 and 24-30], one sees a tonality determined by the characteristic of the accord parfait on the tonic, by the sixth chord assigned to the third and seventh degrees, by the optional choice of the accord parfait or the sixth chord on the sixth degree, and finally, by the accord parfait, and above all, by the unprepared seventh chord (with major third) on the dominant.”

François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871) Belgian composer

Joseph Fétis, (1844). Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l'harmonie contenant la doctrine de la science et de l'art, 2d ed., p. 166. Brussels and Paris.

Quotes

“Composition, even when we have no idea of appearing in print, is an excellent dietetic tonic. … The best and quickest mode of banishing a painful impression, or a torturing feeling, is to give it expression in words. We thus relieve the mind from present, and fortify it against future pangs.”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)

Pain , Feeling , Idea , Appearance

“Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.
But to live, — to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, — this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, — this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 38 The Victory

Life , Death , Way , Feeling

“Me and my brother used to spend a lot of time at music festivals, running away from skinheads. Then my brother became a skinhead… I used to get excruciatingly, mind-numbingly dull guitar lessons from my father: tonic, subdominant, dominant. Yeah, but how do I play it? Tonic, subdominant, mediant. This is a seventh. Great, how do I play it?”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

THIS CULTURAL LIFE: SIENNA GUILLORY Article http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4159/is_20040523/ai_n12754898. The Independent on Sunday. May 23, 2004.

Music , Time

“The capture of Simbirsk, my home town, is a wonderful tonic, the best treatment for my wounds. I feel a new lease of life and energy.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 98.
Collected Works

Life , Feeling , Home

“The relation of tonic to dominant is the foundation of Western triadic tonality. The attempt of the early nineteenth century to substitute third or mediant relationships for the classical dominant amounted to a frontal attack on the principles of tonality, and it eventually contributed to the ruin of triadic tonality. This ruin was accomplished from within the system, however, as mediant relationships were essential to tonality as conceived in the eighteenth century.”

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

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 4 : Formal Interlude

“The concept of 'tonality' signifies the unified relationship of chords to a central tonic and hence comprises two different assumptions: first, the existence of unifying factors, and second, the existence of, or at least the hypothetical ability to reconstruct, a tonal center.”

Ernst Kurth

Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan (1920), p. 273.

“During one of my annual visits to the great Fred Winter's yard I said to him, 'Good God, Fred, your horses look magnificent. Beautifully fit.' Of course they do, you twit,' he said. 'They don't sit up all night drinking gin and tonic and playing cards.”

Jeffrey Bernard (1932–1997) British journalist

From his 'Low Life' column in The Spectator (24.06.83)

God , Drink , Winter , Horse

“A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.”

Roy Blount Jr. (1941) American writer

“Reading and Nothingness, Of Proust in the Summer Sun,” New York Times (June 2, 1985).

Books

“Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet.”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

Way , Personality

“It is the same with the use of force, whether of the mob or of the State, upon diseased society; and not only those who prescribe its indiscriminate use as a sovereign remedy and a permanent tonic, but all who ever propose it as a cure, and even all who would lightly and unnecessarily resort to it, not as a cure, but as an expedient, are social quacks.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Passive Resistance
Context: When a physician sees that his patient's strength is being exhausted so rapidly by the intensity of his agony that he will die of exhaustion before the medical processes inaugurated have a chance to do their curative work, he administers an opiate. But a good physician is always loath to do so, knowing that one of the influences of the opiate is to interfere with and defeat the medical processes themselves. He never does it except as a choice of evils. It is the same with the use of force, whether of the mob or of the State, upon diseased society; and not only those who prescribe its indiscriminate use as a sovereign remedy and a permanent tonic, but all who ever propose it as a cure, and even all who would lightly and unnecessarily resort to it, not as a cure, but as an expedient, are social quacks.

Disease

“Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.”

B.C. Forbes (1880–1954) American journalist

Christmas , Soul , Thinking , Christmas