Words to Live By

Words To Live By

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.  
–   Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)   Sir

But what about the critics?

Don’t pay any attention to the critics – don’t even ignore them.   
–   Samuel Goldwyn (1879-1974)

Always remember, there is no city in the world that has erected a statue to a critic.  
–   Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

Music criticism should be to musicians what ornithology is to birds.  
–   Yuja Wang (Born 1987)

There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.  
–   Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them with which to hang him.   
–   Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642)

They do seem to have strong opinions…

The Sound of Music is a sugar-coated lie people seem to want to eat…we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.  
–   Pauline Kael (1919-2001) 

The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as “anti-popes.”

 “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah…They Stink!!!” National Review  (September 1964)  
–   William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008)

Rock is the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the Earth.  
–   Frank Sinatra (1915-1998)

Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada… Shakespeare is the Corneille of London, but everywhere else he is a great fool. 
–   Voltaire (1694-1778)

Being frenzied and unduly possessed by a spirit of pleasure, talentless modern musicians mix dirges with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs.  
–   Plato (427-347 BC), The Laws

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.  
–   Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Of course, sometimes they have a point…

Where are the bards that pleasured me,…

Where are the rhymes of yesteryear?...

Alas, in Nashville, Tennessee,

Twanging their cliché hearts away…

Woe to the culture that woos TV

Where sponsors flourish and songs decay,

Where clay is hailed as cloisonné

And catch-penny poet is sage and seer.

 –   E.Y. “Yip” Harburg (1896-1981)

Regardless, we can succeed in spite of them…

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. 
–   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

People of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. 
–   Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a byproduct of providing a useful service.   
–   Henry Ford (1863-1947)

But does success mean happiness?

To the spoils go the victor.  
–   F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

Let’s ask Schopenhauer:

Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself an individual, in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, erring; the desires of the will are limitless, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one.  No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of its heart.   
–   Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Are we even free to choose happiness?

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.   
–   Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)  

What we have is not free will, but free won’t. 
–   V.S. Ramachandran (B. 1951)

And is happiness really what we want, or should the “pursuit of happiness” be our real aim?

I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?  
–   Will Smith, from The Pursuit Of Happyness (2006)

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.  
–   Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Within A Budding Grove 

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. 
–   Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other — that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”? 
–   Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), The Gay Science

To render happy, all who joy would win

Must share it; Happiness was born a twin.

–   Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.  
–   Henry James (1843-1916)

Can we learn from the past?

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.   
–   L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), The Go-Between

The great geniuses of the past still rule over us from their graves; they still stalk or scurry about in the present, tripping up the living, mysteriously congesting the traffic, confusing values in art and manners, a brilliant cohort of mortals determined not to die, in possession of the land.  
–   Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)

And was the past really better?

Ancient Athens:

Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.   
–    Pericles (1495-1429 BC)

The Renaissance:

What a century! What literature! How good it is to be alive!

  –   From a letter written in 1518 by Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523)

The Belle Epoque:

The Wonderful Century (published in 1898)

–   Title of a fin de siècle book by naturalist Alfred Wallace (1823-1913)

The Present:

Who, in their right mind, could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine?

  –   Satan, as portrayed by Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

Perhaps we could never even agree on what “better” really means…

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
–   Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others. 
–   Marcus Tulius Cicero (106–43 BC)

Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.  
–   Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

Ah, the French…

We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones.  
–   Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

It is not enough that I succeed. My friends must also fail.  
–   Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)

On the other hand…Ah, the French!

If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper. When people have learned this lesson, everyone will seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world. 
–   Claude Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

Among all our musical masters, l should say, Claude Debussy was the least weighed upon by the dead hand of formula. Yet neither was he an improviser. This latter art, indeed, among all the compositional techniques, is the one most servile to rules of thumb. Debussy's operation was more thorough. Like any Frenchman building a bridge or cooking a meal, painting a picture or laying out a garden, he felt, he imagined, he reasoned, he constructed--and in that order.   
–   Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)

A clever people with shrewd insights…

Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality that they can never satisfy.  
–   Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, it may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority.  
–   Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

And they weren’t alone…

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.  
–   G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), The Napoleon of Notting Hill

It was in the reign of George II that the above-named personages lived and quarreled. Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.  
–   William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863),  Barry Lyndon

Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.     
–   Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.   

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.   

You cannot lift the wage earner up 

by pulling the wage payer down. 

You cannot further the brotherhood of man   

by inciting class hatred.   

You cannot build character and courage   

by taking away people's initiative and independence.   

You cannot help people permanently by doing for them,   

what they could and should do for themselves.

  –   Rev. William Boetcker (1873-1962)  

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV,  you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.   
–   Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), "Cold Turkey" from In These Times

Every child who is born alive, is either a little liberal, or else a little conservative.   
–   Gilbert & Sullivan, Iolanthe (1882)

Every law is an infraction of liberty.   
–   Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at absolute despotism.   
–   Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), The Possessed  

The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced. Fewer laws equal more freedom…  
–   Frank Zappa (1940-1993)

I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all means possible, except by getting off his back.  
–   Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satisfied; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.   
–   C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Grover Cleveland on the ‘pros’ of capitalism…

When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion… Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.  
–   Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), 22nd and 24th President

…And the ‘cons’ of crony capitalism…

Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.  
–   Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), 22nd and 24th President

Adam Smith on materialism and status:

The pleasures of wealth and greatness are largely a delusion, and produce nothing more than a few trifling conveniences to the body.  The attainment of status is not worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.  Yet it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner.  It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.  It is this which first prompted men to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts which ennoble and embellish human life.  
–   Adam Smith (1723-1790)

What Adam Smith understood that Ayn Rand didn’t: 

However selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.  
–   Adam Smith, The Theory Of Moral Sentiments (1759)

Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely…the natural and proper object of love; He desires not only praise, but praise-worthiness; He dreads not only blame, but blame-worthiness…The love of praise-worthiness is by no means derived altogether from the love of praise…the anxious desire that we ourselves should excel is originally founded in our admiration of the excellence of others.  
– Adam Smith, Essay on Moral Sentiments (1769)

And a word from Adam Smith’s mentor:

All claims that reason has the power to supply us with knowledge about the world, and the power to regulate our understanding and conduct, rest on essentially theological claims about the special powers of reason and are therefore ‘unphilosophical’. What passes as ‘knowledge’ has its roots in the imagination and the passions and in the use of intellectual powers we acquire through habit, custom, education and the experience of common life.  
–   David Hume (1711-1776)

Artists often have a different view of “knowledge”…

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.  
–   Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), A Man without a Country

The more we study art the less we care for nature. What art really reveals to us is nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.  
–   Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
–   Mel Brooks (Born 1926)

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.  
–   Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), paraphrasing Emerson 

Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.  
–   Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

And are acutely aware of life’s “tragedy”…

Mahler on his Resurrection Symphony, No. 2, in C Minor:

There is the great question: ‘Is all this only a confused dream, or do life and death have a meaning? What did you live for? Why did you suffer? Is it all only a vast, terrifying joke?’ We must solve these problems in one way or another, if we are to go on living – yes, even if we are to go on dying! He in whose life this call has once resounded must give an answer.

When you awaken from that melancholy dream and must return to life’s confusion, it may easily occur that the perpetually moving, never ending, ever incomprehensible hustle and bustle of life becomes eerie to you, as if at a distance you watch a dance through a window without being able to hear the music. Then the turning and twisting movement of the dancers seems senseless because you are not catching the rhythm, which is the key to it all. The world becomes a ghastly apparition from which you recoil with a cry of desperation."  
–   Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) 

Everything is dead, except the authority of fools... I must unravel the ties that bind me to my art, so that I may be ready at anytime to say to death: whenever you please! What is it that you're waiting for?  
–   Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

"Though much is taken, much abides, and though we are not now that strength which in old days, moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.  
–   Tennyson (1809-1892), from Ulysses

A seductive woman is a trap more bitter than death. Her passion is a snare, and her soft hands are chains. Those who are pleasing to God will escape her, but sinners will be caught in her snare.   
–   Ecclesiastes 7:26

Wait, how did that get in here?  

Oh well, let’s make some music…with feeling please!

The written note is like a strait jacket--whereas music, like life itself, is constant movement, continuous spontaneity, free from any restriction. There are so many excellent instrumentalists who are completely obsessed by the printed note, whereas it has a very limited power to express what the music actually means.   
–   Pablo Casals (1876-1893)

Music, rich, full of feeling, not soulless, is like a crystal on which the sun falls and brings forth from it a whole rainbow. And everyone may admire it for a different reason; one will enjoy the fact that the crystal has been artfully carved, another will like the red color, still another the green, while the fourth will admire the purple. And he who put his soul into the crystal is like one who has poured wine into it. You know that I tell my pupils to play my own and others’ works as they feel them, and that I dislike it if they imitate me too much, adding nothing of their own in the interpretation. As for myself, you know, I seldom play a thing twice in the same way…man is not a machine.  
–   Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.  
–   Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

The poet writes his monologue or dialogue in a certain, continuous rhythm, but the performer, in order to insure an understanding of the sense of the lines, must make pauses and interruptions at places where the poet was not permitted to indicate it by punctuation. The same manner of declamation can be applied to music, and admits of modification only according to the number of performers.  
–   Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)

And what accounts for Beethoven’s universal appeal?

In the Fifth Symphony I discern the Assemblies of the French Revolution, but also, alas, Lally-Tollendal (the weepy defender of the ancien régime).  
–   Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

Precisely, JP! LVB's embrace of human freedom and mastering one’s destiny appeals to idealists of differing political persuasions equally… 

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.  
–   E. M. Forster (1879-1970), Howard’s End

There's only one really rational, scientific explanation for Beethoven.  He was a miracle!
–   A Kindred Soul (anonymous, but wish I'd written it!)

‪Frank Serpico, when asked by Al Pacino why he didn’t just give in and engage in corruption: ‬“Well, if I did that, then who would I be when I listened to Beethoven?”‬‬‬‬‬
–   SSerpico starring Al Pacino (1973)

And of course, Beethoven was not alone…

The only evidence for the existence of UFOs that could withstand more than a moment’s scrutiny is the catalog of J.S. Bach’s works.   
–   William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008)

If we are to convey something of what humans are about then music has to be a part of it.  
–   Carl Sagan (1934-1996), requesting recommendations for the appropriate artifacts for the spaceship Voyager to carry to alien civilizations. 

I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach…But that would be boasting.  
–   Lewis Thomas (1913-1993), in response.

If the mighty autocratic monarch of the north knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin’s works, in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin’s works are cannons buried in flowers.  
–   Robert Schumann (1810-1853)

What accounts for these great geniuses – inspiration or perspiration?  

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.  
–   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) 

“Practice as though your life depended on it; perform as though you don’t give a damn” 
–   Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987)

To render happy; all who joy would win

Must share it; Happiness was born a twin.

  –   Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan

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