Eduard Hanslick Quotes

#1. Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#2. So long as we refuse to include lottery tickets among the symphonies, or medical bulletins among the overtures, we must refrain from treating the emotions as an aesthetic monopoly of music in general or a certain piece of music in particular.

Eduard Hanslick

#3. The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.

Philippa Gregory

#4. On the one hand it is said that the aim and object of music is to excite emotions, i.e., pleasurable emotions; on the other hand, the emotions are said to be the subject matter which musical works are intended to illustrate. Both propositions are alike in this, that one is as false as the other.

Eduard Hanslick

#5. We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us ... but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?

J.G. Farrell

#6. Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

Eduard Hanslick

#7. The achievement of happiness requires not the ... satisfaction of our needs ... but the examination and transformation of those needs.

Stanley Cavell

#8. Kaputt was just a record that did really well for us, and therefore our record label and our booking agent said that we should go out and take our message to the world.

Dan Bejar

#9. We live, we die, and like the grass and trees, renew ourselves from the soft earth of the grave. Stones crumble and decay, faiths grow old and they are forgotten, but new beliefs are born. The faith of the villages is dust now ... but it will grow again ... like the trees.

Chief Joseph

#10. That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit for any intellectual effort goes without saying.

Eduard Hanslick

#11. I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.

Winston Churchill

#12. An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

Eduard Hanslick

#13. You cannot imagine the wild enthusiasm that these two men created in Vienna. Newspapers went into raptures over each new waltz, and innumerable articles appeared about Lanner and Strauss.

Eduard Hanslick

#14. The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.

Eduard Hanslick

#15. Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

Eduard Hanslick

#16. Some people - like a festering finger or a leg shattered beyond repair - just needed to be removed.

Brandon Sanderson

#17. We might as well study the properties of wine by getting drunk.

Eduard Hanslick

#18. Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.

Eduard Hanslick

#19. The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.

Eduard Hanslick

#20. I'm the dark secret that he can't keep hidden - his crossed fingers - his hold-my-breath-to-keep-from-feeling. But I make him feel everything.

Amy A. Bartol