W quotes

View Quote Steven Pinker … advances interesting ideas about understanding human mind in terms of “reverse engineering”: we see that adaptations to our environment have been achieved, and define our task as explaining the means by which these have come about. … But Pinker finds music making—universal in all cultures—to be anomalous. Which means there must be something basically wrong or missing in his view. James could have told him what it is: To miss the joy is to miss all. … The fusion of reality and ideal novelty excites and empowers us, and does so because we are organisms which, to be vital, must celebrate our being.

View Quote Bruce Wilshire, Fashionable Nihilism (2002), p. 34

View Quote Die Menschen heute glauben, die Wissenschaftler seien da, sie zu belehren, die Dichter und Musiker, etc., sie zu erfreuen. Daß diese sie etwas zu lehren haben; kommt ihnen nicht in den Sinn.

View Quote People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them—that does not occur to them.

View Quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1980), p. 36

View Quote One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that—melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that it was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would always be our own and would be cir****scribed, when so many other forces are evidently in action in the final effect.

View Quote Christian Wolff, quoted in Kostelanetz, Richard (editor) and Joseph Darby (editor). Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music. ISBN 0028645812. 

View Quote Books! ‘tis a dull and endless strife:Come, hear the woodland Linnet,How sweet his music! on my life,There’s more of wisdom in it.And hark! how blithe the Throstle sings!He, too, is no mean preacher:Come forth into the light of things,Let Nature be your teacher.

View Quote William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned; An Evening Scene, On the Same Subject”