All Quotes

"For my part I did not approve of Stravinsky's predilection for Bach's method — pseudo-Bachism — or rather, I did not approve adopting someone else's idiom and calling it one's own. True, I had written a Classical Symphony myself, but that was only a passing phase. With Stravinsky this 'Bachism' was becoming the basic line of his music."

"Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God."

"More like a sacrilege du printemps."

"Music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing."

"Except for the violin pieces and a few of my orchestra pieces, all of my works from the Passacaglia on relate to the death of my mother."

"Webern attracts me, though there's a lot that I don't understand. His music is a combination of purity, complexity and abstraction in the very best sense of the term."

"Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge."

"[the impression of the first time I heard Webern's music in a concert performance] was the same as I was to experience a few years later when I first laid eyes on a Mondriaan canvas...: those things, of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality"

"I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature," he said, irritated at my failure to respond. "Nature's virtue is intact," I reassured him. "I just know some different laws."

"Gods are like that. It isn't enough for them to run everything. They want to be famous, too."

"In his sleep the voice of the land came to him like whispered lullabies. I did not choose you, said the land. I cannot speak except to those who hear me, and because it is in your nature to hear and listen, I spoke to you and lead you here to save me, save me, save me. Do you know the desert they will make of me? Encased in burning dust or layers of ice, either way I'll be dead. My whole purpose is to thrust life upward out of my soils, and feel the presence of living feet, and hear the songs of birds and the low music of the animals, growling, lowing, chittering, whatever voice they choose. That's what I ask of you, the dance of life, just once to make the man whose mother will teach him to be Quetzalcoatl and save me, save me, save me."

"They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty."

"I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration."

"If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?"

"I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work."

"The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered."

"He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them."

"Only a fool can't be fooled."

"She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now."

"I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right."

"He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more."

"I wanted your songs. You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs."

"You are mine, but you are not mine. I am yours, but you hardly know it."

"[He] looked death in the eye and did not seem disappointed."

"Nor gold nor silver seek I but above All gifts, the heart, and buy it with my love, Yea! one sad contrite heart which men despise, More than my throne and fixed decree I prize."

"O base one, behold a hundred thousand souls Dancing towards the deadly sword of his love, Behold water in a pitcher; pour it out; Will that water run away from the stream? When that water joins the water of the stream It is lost therein and becomes itself the stream."

"The Sufi is as it were, the ‘son of the season’ But the pure is exalted above season and state, Religious raptures depend on feelings and will But the pure one is regenerated by the breath of Jesus, You are a lover of your own raptures, not of me, You turn to me only in hope of experiencing raptures."

"The life of this world is a truce between opposites."

"Form is born of that which is without form, Wherefore to thee every moment comes death and ‘return,’ Mustafa saith ‘The world endureth only a moment,’ So thought is an arrow shot by God into the air, How can it stay in the air? It returns to God."

"I am a painter, a maker of pictures; every moment I shape a beauteous form, And then in thy presence I melt them all away. I call up a hundred phantoms and endue them with a spirit When I behold thy phantom, I cast them in the fire, Art thou the vintner’s cup-bearer or the enemy of him who is sober, Or is it thou who mak’st a ruin of every house I build? In thee the soul is dissolved, with thee it is mingled, So I will cherish the soul, because it has a perfume of thee."

"The lamp of the heart that is a timid trader Acquires neither loss nor gain by its ventures, Nay it acquires loss, for it is precluded from gain, ’Tis the lamp that takes fire that acquires light."

"Till the corn be ground with the mill, how can our table be furnished with bread?"

"Body is not veiled from soul, neither soul from body, Yet no man hath ever seen a soul."

"Our breathings are lifted up in fear of God, Offerings from us to the throne of Eternity, Then come down to us rewards for our praises The double thereof yea mercies from the king of glory, Therefore are we constrained to utter these praises That slaves may attain the height of God’s gifts, And so this rising and descent go on evermore, And cease not for ever and aye."

"Beats there a heart within that breast of thine, Then compass rev’rently its sacred shrine; For the true spiritual K‘aba is the heart And no proud pile of perishable art, When God ordained the pilgrim rite, that sign Was meant to lead thy heart to things divine, A thousand times he treads that round in vain, Who e’en one human heart would idly pain."

"Through ignorance, sloth and folly, Though He stands by us, we are shut off from Him, The noise of thunder makes the head of the thirsty ache, When he knows not that it unlocks the blessed showers, His eyes are fixed on the running stream Unwitting of the sweetness of the rain from heaven; He urges the steed of his desire towards the caused, And perforce remains shut off from the causer."

"So long as a babe cannot grasp or run, It takes its father’s back for its carriage, But when it becomes independent and uses its hands It falls into grievous troubles and disgrace."

"Better to arm a drunken negro than To lavish learning on a wicked man."

"Place a sword in his hand and remove his impotence To see if he turns out a warrior or a robber; Because freewill is that with which ‘We honour Adam,’ Half the swarm become bees, and half wasps."

"Our life’s our quiver. When our years are vainly spent In chasing phantoms, grief one day will have its vent. Let God’s protection mercifully on us rest, All fancies and all phantoms stand at once confessed, God’s servants are His shadows here below on earth To this world dead, but living in a second birth."

"Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (1914)"

"Thou hast come to draw men to union with Me, Not to drive them far away from Me, So far as possible, engage not in dissevering; ‘The thing most repugnant to Me is divorce.’"

"Thou wert first and last thou shalt be, Make my last better than my first, When Thou art hidden, I am of the infidels, When Thou art manifest, I am of the faithful."

"You are in the bonds of (absorbed in) the arrangement of beard and turban, How will you gain him who quaffs the mighty flagon (of love)?"

"Thou wert dust and art spirit, thou wert ignorant and art wise, He who has led thee thus far, will lead thee further also, How pleasant are the pains He makes thee suffer while He gently draws thee to Himself, His flames are as water, do not frown upon Him."

"Set thy whole desire on that whereof thou hast no hope, For thou hast come thus far from original hopelessness."

"You are as a dry valley and I as the rain, You are as a ruined city and I as the architect, Except my service which is joy’s sunrise Man has never felt and never will feel an impression of joy."

"Thou didst sow the seed of deceit, thou didst indulge in derision, Thou didst regard God as nothing: see now, O miscreant!"

"O honoured guest in love’s high feast, O bird of the angel sphere, ’Tis cause to weep if thou wilt keep thy habitation here. A voice at morn to thee is borne—God whispers to the soul, ‘If on the way the dust thou’llt lay, thou soon wilt gain the goal, That road be thine toward the shrine; and lo! in bush and briar The many slain by love and pain in flower of young desire, Who on the track fell wounded back and saw not ere the end A ray of bliss, a touch, a kiss, a token of the Friend."

"Seek earnestly for deliverance from the uncongenial, The society of the uncongenial is like the grave."