Best 12 quotes in «classical quotes» category

Epic art is founded on action, and the model of a society in which action could play out in greatest freedom was that of the heroic Greek period; so said Hegel, and he demonstrated it with The Iliad: even though Agamemnon was the prime king, other kings and princes chose freely to join him and, like Achilles, they were free to withdraw from the battle. Similarly the people joined with their princes of their own free will; there was no law that could force them; behavior was determined only by personal motives, the sense of honor, respect, humility before a more powerful figure, fascination with a hero's courage, and so on. The freedom to participate in the struggle and the freedom to desert it guaranteed every man his independence. In this way did action retain a personal quality and thus its poetic form. Against this archaic world, the cradle of the epic, Hegel contrasts the society of his own period: organized into the state, equipped with a constitution, laws, a justice system, an omnipotent administration, ministries, a police force, and so on. The society imposes its moral principles on the individual, whose behavior is thus determined by far more anonymous wishes coming from the outside than by his own personality. And it is in such a world that the novel was born.

Beethoven introduced us to anger. Haydn taught us capriciousness, Rachmaninoff melancholy. Wagner was demonic. Bach was pious. Schumann was mad, and because his genius was able to record his fight for sanity, we heard what isolation and the edge of lunacy sounded like. Liszt was lusty and vigorous and insisted that we confront his overwhelming sexuality as well as our own. Chopin was a poet, and without him we never would have understood what night was, what perfume was, what romance was.

I am grateful that their unyielding passion is completely allowed to flow through their delicate fingers and wrists onto their lovely instruments, sharing this on a level which is beyond words, resonating with one's deepest soul.

Chi il bel sogno di Doretta potè indovinar? Il suo mister come mai come mai fini Ahimè! un giorno uno studente in bocca la baciò e fu quel bacio rivelazione: fu la passione! Folle amore! Folle ebbrezza! Chi la sottil carezza d'un bacio così ardente mai ridir potrà? Ah! mio sogno! Ah! mia vita! Che importa la ricchezza se alfine è rifiorita la felicità! O sogno d'or poter amar così!

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique.

If one prevents a man from working for the good of society while at the same time providing for the satisfaction of his own needs, then only one way remains open to him: to make himself richer and others poorer by the violent oppression and spoliation of his fellow men.

String theory makes sense to me because the universe is a symphony that creates harmony with the vibration of our strings.

I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my ‘Pinhead Mood Music’. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi’s familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect.

Pavlov’s dogs will drool at the site of any food, So go ahead and ring the bell, Sing a classical song about it and Then advertises what sells

The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze. With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.

Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.

When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world.