Wise Quotes

“A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.” -
Max Lucado
"All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities."
Thomas Sowell
Don't be bigger than the characters.
Hans Zimmer
Acting is "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances."
Sanford Meisner
"The listener should be aware of the expression, not the construction [of music]."
Yehudi Wyner
"Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a
sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
Oscar Wilde
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be
counted.”
William Bruce Cameron
“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
Nietzsche
[They] get the gesture right, but not the content
Topher Saunders
Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
John Cage
We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
Anais Nin
Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.
Paul Rand
When we see truth in someone else's story, we recognize it as part of a universal
story.
Stephen Tobolowsky (http://www.npr.org/2012/09/08/160686623/an-invitation-
to-join-the-dangerous-animals-club)
The market is a simplified form of cooperation among strangers
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
The classroom is not primarily about information, but rather motivation and
determination.
Peter Norvig, Stanford University
A big part of what an institution does is scaffold your motivation.
Roger Brown, President, Berklee College of Music
Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Meaning? Vice (not behaving according to virtue) pays tribute to the virtue that it
ignores in action by complementing it with words.
 “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out
just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure
of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till
they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Frederick Douglass
Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand
everything too soon.
Alexander Pope
A myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false. In a deeper sense - the
religious sense - a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for a people.
The focus is not on the story's relation to reality, but on its function.
David Ray Griffin

“Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”

- Albert Einstein

“Let no one imagine that there is a mechanical cure for this mechanical disease.”
-Jews Mumford, "In the Name of Sanity", 1954

"The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations."

- Adam Smith

““The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome
burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if
the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”
-Terence McKenna

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through
states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every
human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the
years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle
with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil
from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is
concerned he wipes out the world.”
- Chesterton

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the
music."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.”
- John Dewey

“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking

in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the
masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
- George Orwell

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a
craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
- Louis Nizer, American trial lawyer

"Each day the first day: each day a life. Each morning we must hold out the
chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back. It must be held out empty
—for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity."

- Dag Hammarskjöld

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

- Bertrand Russell

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What
more can one want?”
Oscar Wilde

‘There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born

to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.’
-James Salter, Light Years
A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing. ~Joey
Adams

“Our love,
our love is all of God’s money
Everyone is a burning sun"
-Wilco
"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it."
-Nelson Mandela
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
salary depends on his not understanding it."

—Upton Sinclair
"There’s no net. I think that’s part of the secret. There’s a drive inside of me that says, “you
have to find the answer."

"I’m no longer pushed, I’m pulled. Push will wear you out. When you’re pushing to do
something, you only got so much will power. But when you’re pulled, when there’s
something larger than yourself that you’re here to serve, that you believe you’re made for, that
brings energy.

-Tony Robbins, I am not your guru

Perhaps the poet whose verses gladden us was a sad solitary, and the musician a
melancholic dreamer; but even so, their work shares in the cheerful serenity of the gods and
the stars.
-Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

"He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing, understands nothing” -
Paracelsus

“What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” Ralph Waldo
Emerson

“For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.” Henry
David Thoreau

“It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.” Cecil
B. DeMille, Ten Commandments

"We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Albert
Einstein

“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where
we began and to know the place for the first time” T.S. Eliot ****

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” - Peter Drucker
and Warren Bennis

"Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life."
- Ludwig van Beethoven
There is nothing hotter than hearing the woman sitting next to you tell you, “I miss you.”
kestutis daugirdas

“
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape
it.”- Bertolt Brecht
"
“The thing with music education is that it is good at teaching technique, but not
texture,” he continues. “You only learn about that from listening to music and
experimenting on your own. For me, it’s about feeling an instrument. For instance,
I was given a double bass when I was 14. I’d never played one before, but I’d sung
bass parts, I’d played basslines on the piano, I’d listened to bass players. I
understood how the bass felt before I’d even picked one up. Same when I started
drumming. My skill on those instruments needed to catch up with my
understanding of them. It’s a backwards way of doing it; most people start learning
an instrument, and their playing is governed by their technique. But, for me,
I knew what sounds and grooves I wanted to create
, I just had to find out ways to achieve them.” -
Jacob Collier

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/07/jazz-prodigy-jacob-collier-i-
knew-the-sounds-i-wanted-i-just-had-to-find-out-how-to-make-them

"We do not succeed and changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire
changes."
-Proust

As Kierkegaard put it, “The more original a human being is, the deeper is his
anxiety.”

Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate…. absolute justice is

achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.
- Albert Camus

The dream is an involuntary art of poetry.

~Jean Paul Richter

“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.” – Aristotle

https://www.biblestudytools.com/proverbs/4-23-compare.html
"People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed."
-;Samuel Johnson, English author, critic, and lexicographer (1709-1784)

When a man is unanimously condemned to death”, says the Talmud, “he must be
released at once.”

"If you’re not feeling motivated — you’re either not experiencing enough pain to
change, or you’re not curious enough about the power of possibility.” (link)

Chris Smith, founder of The Campfire Effect

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in
having new eyes.” Proust
I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held such goodness.
-Walt Whitman
The power to work is a second youth.

Van Gogh

“Evolution is beautiful, but not pretty.”

Jeff Salzman

“Safety is the most unsafe spiritual path you can take.

Doshin Roshi (link)

Sanity is a talent for not letting whatever frightens us about ourselves destroy our
pleasure in life.

Adam Phillips, Going Sane

When you beautify your mind, you beautify your world. You learn to see differently. In what
seemed like dead situations, secret possibilities and invitations begin to open before you. In
old suffering that held you long paralyzed, you find new keys. When your mind awakens, your
life comes alive and the creative adventure of your soul takes off. Passion and compassion
become your new companions.
 John O'Donohue

I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing
star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man
will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that
is no longer able to despise himself.

Frederick Nietzsche

"in art, sincerity is the sine qua non which at the same time guarantees nothing”

Igor Stravinsky (link)

“When you pray, move your feet.”

Quaker saying

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry
water.”

Zen Proverb

"“the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau

"“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions
themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to
live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then
gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically,
the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

Mark Manson, the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

“The most difficult thing to give up is something that almost works.”

?? from Jerry Moreau LMFT

“Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”

Ian McDonald, River of Gods

“You feel that you are something being done by the universe, yet the universe is equally
something being done by you.”
-Alan Watts

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
― Maya Angelou

“The goal of argument is not to be right, it’s to get it right.”

unknown philosophy teacher

"Everything good that has happened to me has happened to me as a direct result of helping
someone else.”

Danny Trejo

“There’s a difference between feel and real.”

Danny Maude (golfer)

"Holding onto anger (or hate) is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
~Anonymous

"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants."

Epictetus

"My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my
field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint
diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the
chains that shackle the spirit.”
Igor Stravinsky