Great Classical Quotes

#1. A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?

Vera Nazarian

#2. I played piano for a lot of my childhood and stupidly quit. I wish I hadn't - I could have been a great classical pianist!

Frankie Cosmos

#3. There has been a seismic shift in the business world. The great classical business principles still hold true but they need to be fused with cutting edge internet technology.

Harvey MacKay

#4. I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.

Warren Zevon

#5. There's a great energy and drive that takes precedence in a lot of rock and pop. It's about making a strong visceral connection. That's something that I think great classical music can have, too.

Joshua Roman

#6. I thought the best route to being the great actor I wanted to be was to play the great classical parts.

Stephen Mangan

#7. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#8. I wanted to be Laurence Olivier, basically, to be a great classical actor, and also be able to do modern things.

Stacy Keach

#9. I don't regard myself as a great classical or jazz pianist. I like country music, but I'm not a great player. I just like music. Drums 'n' bass is pretty exciting and I'd love to explore it.

Keith Emerson

#10. I have a huge record and cd collection of all kinds of great classical, jazz and all music but I find the internet very accessible and quick.

Aaron Zigman

#11. I would like to be as fit as I've always been. I've been blessed with good health, I've been blessed with stamina. Particularly for those great classical roles, you need an Olympian stamina. I, fortunately, have that.

Derek Jacobi

#12. I love music, especially classical like Verdi; it's a great way to relax.

David Suchet

#13. I also have a big love of classical music played on piano because this is the environment I grew up in my brother being one of the great masters in this world.

Suzi Quatro

#14. Classical works; all (of course) immeasurably superior to anything produced in later times; and all (from my present point of view) possessing the one great merit of enchaining nobody's interest, and exciting nobody's brain.

Wilkie Collins

#15. Classical music is always a really great way for me to get my chops to where I want them to be.

Lucia Micarelli

#16. I think differently, I think it's about reaching everybody on every different plane and every different level, and if I could remix the song and do a dance remix, that's great. If I could do a classical version, that'll be great too. It's all just about expression.

Deborah Cox

#17. I'm a boxing junkie, a serial-killer junkie, and a classical guitar junkie. All of these guys are great, poetic references.

Mark Kozelek

#18. I remember being in college and taking a class on classical music and getting a big laugh when I said very sincerely that I was not really into trained voices. Some of the greatest singers can transcend their technical perfection and still sound great.

Ira Kaplan

#19. I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries.

Howard Shore

#20. I have a great interest in classical mythology and I need to make a sphinx or satyr every once in awhile to satisfy those interests. ( ... )

Wendy Froud

#21. The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

Camille Paglia

#22. I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.

Maurice Sendak

#23. I have no doubt that there are great people about though ... the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams).

Gary Lucas

#24. It's much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn't listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, '67.

David Bowie

#25. Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary.

Bent Larsen

#26. The great hospitals, houses of confinement, establishments of religion and public order, of assistance and punishment, of governmental charity and welfare measures, are a phenomenon of the classical period:

Michel Foucault

#27. I think classical music tuition is, well, was when I was a child, was an abomination. I think in some ways it is one of life's great tragedies for everybody who gives up an instrument.

Hugh Laurie

#28. Music is monophonic in the Eastern world, especially if we're talking about Indian music, Persian music. What we have in classical and Western world is harmony. So I think it's a great idea to be able to bring the best of two together and create something new.

Hafez Nazeri

#29. A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

Henry Steele Commager

#30. I grew up as a dancer. I did tap, classical ballet, all of that. I did Indian dancing, or Bharata Natyam, classic temple dancing from Madras, originally. My mother always had the great idea that I should learn it.

Roselee Goldberg

#31. I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.

Herbie Hancock

#32. I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.

Serj Tankian

#33. Sometimes in the great soundtrack of our lives there are no words, there are only emotions; I believe this is why God gave us classical music.

Anonymous

#34. We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Patti Smith

#35. But I'd play on everything from pop records to a lot of the glam stuff to rock stuff to classical stuff. I used to get called to do all those things, it was great.

Rick Wakeman

#36. Frank Johnson was recognized as one of the great federal judges of American history, I suppose. He was a law-and-order judge. He was a classical, I think, conservative. But he believed that civil rights provided in the Constitution applied to everybody.

Jeff Sessions

#37. We wanted to make a powerful cello sound in order to show to the world the possibilities of the cello and to use it in a different way than the classical way they are used to. We wanted to play something exciting, something crazy, something to draw younger generations to this great instrument.

Luka Sulic

#38. They're simply following what was laid down in front and they play the same thing. So, there's no great challenge In being a classical drummer.

Buddy Rich

#39. There has been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex.

Mark Tobey

#40. But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there's a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that's possible with the instrument.

Gary Burton

#41. As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.

Lesley Garrett

#42. Violin for me is a great instrument because you can use it as a rhythmical instrument and also as a melodic instrument ... You can pretty much do everything with the violin. Sometimes I feel classical music limits the violin.

David Garrett

#43. The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous.

Chen-Ning Yang

#44. To me idealized characters are so boring to play, especially having grown up in the classical theater. That's a great experience, but as a woman, especially, you've played a lot of idealized characters. So when you've got someone who has weaknesses as well as strengths, that's interesting.

Annette Bening

#45. Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

Ahmad Jamal

#46. Europe in general is a great place for me, but specifically Germany has been very good to me. Germans love classical music ... Electronic dance music is massive over there, so I'm kind of the marriage between the two.

Lindsey Stirling

#47. In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.

Paul Heyse

#48. I got the O.B.E because I represent England outside of England more ... but thinking of me as an actor, I haven't done all the classical theatre, all the great roles. Think of Helen Mirren and me. Helen, who I adore, is a friend - should be Dame. I am the rebel, the revolutionary on the side.

Charlotte Rampling