Instrument That Quotes

#1. I do go back and listen to my songs. I'm biting my fingernails the whole way through, but I do listen. I have a lot of songs I've wanted to re-record just because of how advanced technology is and the different instrument sounds that I'm more experienced with.

Andrae Crouch

#2. He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.

Rachel Hartman

#3. If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

#4. Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism - the belief that the individual exists to serve others - is translated into political reality.

Nathaniel Branden

#5. Since I've grown up I really wanted to be able to create something different. In Persian music, opposite, again, to classical music, that the instrument developed and evolved over, like, hundreds of years, our instrument all remained the same.

Hafez Nazeri

#6. It's important to me in the creation of it because I figured as soon as I crossed that threshold into effects and loops it would completely undermine the premise of how I go about creating things physically, with the instrument.

Colin Stetson

#7. 32. And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they hear thy words, but they do them not.

Anonymous

#8. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#9. If the church were the goal, then sustaining that church would logically be the priority of the highest order. But if the Kingdom of God was the goal, then the Kingdom-building instrument would gladly self-sacrifice for the eternal prize.

Jeff Christopherson

#10. Genetics and beats? I feel like the drumbeat is a natural thing. Our heartbeat moves at a certain BPM. The drumbeat, being the first instrument, the platform for us, being that we all kind of come from that - it's all beats.

Q-Tip

#11. THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#12. Anything has a rhythm to it, comedy or drama. There has to be a musicality to it. And everybody can't play the same instrument, ideally. But I think that we all have the same comedic tendencies, and that's why it works. We all sort of agree with what's funny.

Bradley Cooper

#13. My first instrument was actually the trombone, but that didn't last long. Soon I was playing guitar in bands from the time I was 11 or 12.

Dave Grohl

#14. DYNAM comes from the Greek dynamis, meaning "power." A dyne is a unit used in measuring force; an instrument that measures force is called a dynamometer. And when Alfred Nobel invented a powerful explosive in 1867, he named it dynamite.

Merriam-Webster

#15. I had decided that if I was going to be a singer, I had to earn it. I had to learn how to play an instrument.

Madonna Ciccone

#16. People say that steadiness of mind is an end; no, it is a beginning. I am there; I can explain everything up to that point. Then I struggle to discover what comes after, so this steadiness is not an end, it is the beginning and the instrument.

B.K.S. Iyengar

#17. That before living agent, now became the living instrument.

Herman Melville

#18. For me I feel close to the Savior when I can do in a small way for someone else, what He would do if He were there. In a way, that's what being an instrument in all about ... to make it possible for His love to reach more of His children.

Barbara W. Winder

#19. Once I got a guitar that was relatively user-friendly, but not super-duper easy, I really came on as a guitarist, at that point. It helped. It was a super-expensive guitar either, but something needs to steer you a bit, if you're playing an instrument that is really hard.

Jimmy Page

#20. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

John French Sloan

#21. The physical world exists, but that's only the paint and canvas; that's only the instrument we use to make music; that's only the stage where the play is performed.

Dennis Vickers

#22. In the beginning of my twenties, I started transcendental meditation. For years, I did nothing else. Every holiday, I went to courses. Meditation is a real simple instrument. You don't need a long beard or a sari. It's meant to bring you to yourself. It's as easy as that.

Peter Lindbergh

#23. Since love first made the breast an instrument
Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart
Was molten to a mirror, like a rose
I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang
This mirror in your sight
Gaze you therein

Muhammad Iqbal

#24. The voice gets to the soul of a person more than any other instrument. Because it's the voice. It sings talks, it cries, it laughs, it squeals, it barks, it shouts it whispers, There is no other instrument that can do that. We're born with it.

Bobby McFerrin

#25. If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.

Richard Stallman

#26. I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

Tom Waits

#27. Try to remember that you are the instrument and I the doer. If you can hold on to this, no sin can touch you. Instrument,

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

#28. As a melody instrument player, it's all about getting from one note to the next, and those intervals and how you navigate your way through these vertical structures of chords. You realize that everything's moving forward, and it's all linear.

David Sanborn

#29. Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.

Buddy DeFranco

#30. I think my first instrument was a ukulele that they gave me. I used to know how to play that pretty well.

Don Henley

#31. You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.

Norman Mailer

#32. Music gives inspiration ... one that sounds windy with humming sound, such can put you in a trance, only to come back and discover some witty ideas.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#33. Who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?
See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving.

Kahlil Gibran

#34. My headmaster chastised me with a diabolical instrument a leather strap tacked to a piece of wood but he taught me with such villainous success that I am now Prime Minister.

Robert Menzies

#35. I spend a lot of time copying saxophone players and trumpet players. Not to say that it is not important to listen to guitar players, but there's so much music out there and so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.

Bill Frisell

#36. A lottery is a salutary instrument and a tax ... laid on the willing only, that is to say, on those who can risk the price of a ticket without sensible injury, for the possibility of a higher prize.

Thomas Jefferson

#37. Love your body. Be kind to it, nourish it, tender it. It is the pure instrument of expression
that allows you to experience life on this plane.

Ramtha

#38. Everybody in our family studied a musical instrument. My father was really big on that. Somehow I only took a year or two of piano lessons and I convinced my father to let me take dancing lessons.

Madonna Ciccone

#39. I feel like the songs that I write are best when they are performed by an ensemble, rather than by one solo instrument.

Thalia Zedek

#40. The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another person's wishes and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.

Stanley Milgram

#41. You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

Charlie Parker

#42. I think having musical training as a child was really, really important. I studied piano as a child. Piano is a great instrument to understand musical theory on. I think I have that in my brain somewhere.

Corin Tucker

#43. We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it ... No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.

Robert H. Jackson

#44. Do what you can on this plane to relieve suffering by constantly working on yourself to be an instrument for the cessation of suffering. To me, that's what the emerging game is all about.

Ram Dass

#45. Although Oppenheimer's mind was not the whiz-bang computer of a John von Neumann or the astral navigation system of a Hans Bethe, it processed other men's original contributions so adeptly that for multifaceted excellence it may well have been the finest scientific instrument of all.

Algis Valiunas

#46. There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument.

Aimee Mann

#47. When I was in school, you could pick any instrument you want, and they'd teach you how to play it. That changed my life. I loved playing music in school, and it sent me on my path as a musician.

Flea

#48. When your body is your instrument, it needs maintenance and it needs to be held in a certain way. That's a universal thread, whether you're an athlete, a dancer, an actor or a singer. It's all about maintaining your body because that allows you to do what you do.

Josh Peck

#49. An image, a dance step, a song may function from time to time as entertainment, but the root and full practice of the arts lies in the recognition that art is power, an instrument of communion between the self and all that is important, all that is sacred.

Peter London

#50. Don't say you want to be an actor and not know how to read a script. Don't give up 15 minutes before the miracle comes. Everyone's career ebbs and flows, especially if you're African American. That's the time to dig in and keep your instrument sharp.

Erik King

#51. I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

Thomas Jefferson

#52. The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light - grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.

Eleanor Catton

#53. She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols. Where do your loyalties lie, Mr. Bahri, with Islam or the state?

Azar Nafisi

#54. Make no mistake, the woman had a heart. She had a bigger one that people would think. There was a lot in it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. Remember that she was the woman with the instrument strapped to her body in the long, moon-slit night.

Markus Zusak

#55. An electronic instrument is just harboring a natural element the same way that a guitar is harboring an acoustic element. It's all nature, really.

Patrick Wolf

#56. No one can take less pains than to hold his tongue. Hear much, and speak little; for the tongue is the instrument of the greatest good and greatest evil that is done in the world.

Walter Raleigh

#57. You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

Nate Silver

#58. Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

John Updike

#59. The best music happens when you have a personal connection to it. That same philosophy can extend to the instrument you hold in your hands: if a guitar means something special, you're bound to do great things with it.

Frank Iero

#60. There's something fundamental to the harp that has retained its appeal my whole life. It's an instrument I am just in love with.

Joanna Newsom

#61. Where do these arms come from, these Saturday night specials that constitute the instrument of threats in bank robberies, or the hand grenades used by terrorists? How can their sales and their import be permitted?

Alva Myrdal

#62. My first instrument was the drums. Not quite sure why I quit and changed to guitar, but I'm sure my parents might have convinced me that the guitar was way better.

Jill Sobule

#63. We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?

Sherry Turkle

#64. The harpsichord was actually ideologically considered a very questionable instrument in that period, much like I think it's ideologically considered suspect today in some circles.

Mahan Esfahani

#65. I would argue that no financial instrument counted as regulatory capital should be allowed to receive any protection from losses.

Ben Bernanke

#66. Indeed, a more astounding fact, in the heart of society, cannot be conceived than this: That law should have become an instrument of injustice.

Frederic Bastiat

#67. As a camera is an instrument that teaches us how to see when we don't have a camera, writing is a process that teaches how to think when we are not writing.

Ted Agon

#68. If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.

Andy Summers

#69. An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument.

Henry Miller

#70. When I was 17 I got a guitar for my birthday and started discovering Bob Dylan and James Taylor and the whole '60s thing, and that made me want to make songs, to go beyond just playing an instrument. I needed to write I guess.

Jason Reeves

#71. To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: It is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instrument of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral.

Leo Tolstoy

#72. Prayer is so mighty an instrument that no one ever thoroughly mastered all its keys. They sweep along the infinite scale of man's wants and God's goodness.

Hugh Miller

#73. I've never been one that thinks that the function of an instrument is to approach the purity of voice or the structure of a beautifully sung line.

Evan Parker

#74. The snow wasn't deep - in many places its crust was firm enough that they actually walked on top of it - but the wind was surgical, a precision instrument with needles for teeth, and it found even the tiniest exposed places on her skin, attacking them.

Joe Schreiber

#75. Greg Trooper writes great songs, including one of my very favorite songs in the world, Little Sister. On top of all that, there's his voice - an instrument I have coveted for 15 years.

Steve Earle

#76. I love the fact that people don't see the ukulele as a serious instrument. A lot of people see it as more of a toy, and I love that because it just proves that people aren't intimidated by the instrument. They aren't afraid to pick it up.

Jake Shimabukuro

#77. I believe that every human being should try to do good for someone else. There are so many different ways to do it. My art can be an instrument for helping people ... What a good feeling - that I can do that with my art ...

Romero Britto

#78. I didn't really know a lot of the history when I was younger. I didn't realize that the harp is coded in such a specific way in musical circles. It's kind of this society instrument because of its history as a young woman's parlor instrument.

Joanna Newsom

#79. Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

Vladimir Nabokov

#80. I don't really believe in writer's block or anything like that. If I'm not feeling words, I may pick up an instrument and play with sounds or delve into different types of creativity and expression.

Saul Williams

#81. The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

#82. So I think that is one of the reasons we can face some regional problems, which are very difficult, very dramatic and is necessary to have instruments to solve these problems. NATO is such instrument.

Aleksander Kwasniewski

#83. The writer's ultimate purpose is to use his gifts to develop man's awareness of himself so that he, man, can become a better instrument for living together with other men. This sense of identity is the root by which all honest creative effort is fed.

Jay Saunders Redding

#84. Words are a pretty blunt instrument. There's always going to be slippage between the words and the infinite complexities of a thought. As a writer, I find that frustrating, but as a social animal, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Kate Grenville

#85. Still to this day, I am deeply satisfied when watching a guitar player who is connected with their art and instrument. GuitarTV helps you tap into that connection, and to each other.

Steve Vai

#86. In 1972, I got my first electric bass and started playing the kind of instrument I play now. I found that the majority of musicians couldn't bear that. They are not used to listening to the bass because they think the bass is in the background to support them.

Eberhard Weber

#87. The basic idea of a hyper instrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how it's being played - literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is.

Tod Machover

#88. The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

Janet Malcolm

#89. Diane Cluck is a virtuosic talent with an emotionality that feels at once ancient and alien. Her mastery of her voice as an ecstatic instrument is so compelling.

Antony Hegarty

#90. I try not to talk during the day when I have a show that night. My voice is my instrument, just like a saxophonist's instrument is his saxophone, plus also his voice, if he's the one between tunes that makes announcements.

Emo Philips

#91. That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.

Mordechai Vanunu

#92. I took vocal lessons for the first time and actually learned a lot about using my voice as an instrument as opposed to just doing what I've always done and going by feeling. I'm still doing that, but I've learned a lot of tricks and how to manipulate and play with my voice a little bit.

Travie McCoy

#93. To become straight, you have to transform your cock into a phallus, that well-washed instrument of power The asshole can remain dirty, but you've got to sew it up, forget the half of the penis that joins it, favor external part and confine orgasm to that part

Tony Duvert

#94. People don't think of cello as a rock instrument, really, and we want people to know all the possibilities that the cello can offer.

Luka Sulic

#95. I do the best I can with any instrument I get attracted to. But they're just tools in order for you to express yourself and that's really the upshot of it.

John Mayall

#96. The music you make is shaped by what you play it on ... if you feel that you're not getting enough out of a song, change the instrument - go from an acoustic to an electric or vice versa, or try an open tuning ... do something to shake it up ...

Mark Knopfler

#97. Having a body that is like a musical instrument, open enough to be able to resonate, literally resonate with what is coming both from the inside and from the outside, so that one is able to surrender to powers greater than oneself.

Marion Woodman

#98. It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another; so that there were few of the barbarian nations that she answered by an interpreter.

Plutarch

#99. The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

Stan Getz

#100. The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Martha Graham