Top 100 Quotes About Composition
#1. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.
David Maraniss
#2. Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?
Wilkie Collins
#4. The composition of a common world would be the definition of politics.
Bruno Latour
#5. We often hear the terms 'positional' and 'tactical' used as opposites. But this is as wrong as to consider a painting's composition unrelated to its subject. Just as there is no such thing as 'artistic' art, so there is no such thing as 'positional' chess.
Samuel Reshevsky
#6. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
Madeleine L'Engle
#7. A good army composition is: 10 Giants, 60 Archers, 6-10 Wall Breakers & around 80-ish Goblins.
2UP GUIDES
#8. I may juggle the composition, as the strength of a picture is in the composition. Or I may play with the light. But I never interfere with the subject. The subject has to fall into place on its own and, if I don't like it, I don't have to print it
George Rodger
#9. ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.
Ambrose Bierce
#11. Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes ... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.
Kazimir Malevich
#12. Though you are unaware of it, when you run cool wine over your tongue, you don't just taste its chemical composition; you also taste its price.
Leonard Mlodinow
#13. I'm the one flunking out of this goddam place, and you're asking me to write you a goddam composition.
J.D. Salinger
#14. Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
Brian Eno
#15. At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#16. We don't want to be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. That type of thing wasn't what we were after. It was most important for each of us to be equal in input and output - each of us has to pull the same amount, musically, in composition and in every sense of being in the band.
Neil Peart
#17. Composition is as natural as jumping and running to children who have been allowed due use of books.
Charlotte Mason
#18. I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.
Rohinton Mistry
#19. The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#20. You cannot separate the composition from the life of the moment. It is all one thing, to be decided in a split second while you're living through it.
Edwin Land
#21. I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.
Henri Matisse
#22. Chess is one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance
Garry Kasparov
#23. How good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard works, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.
Jane Austen
#24. I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.
Ken Burns
#25. An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.
Henri Matisse
#26. Composition is definitely what I'm born to do, and it came last.
David Friedman
#27. And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
#28. Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
#29. My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures.
Rashid Johnson
#30. Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.
Henry Ward Beecher
#31. Ladies and gentlemen, if some of the leading artists in a civilization see a man urinating in another man's mouth and see composition and lighting and do not see their civilization being pissed upon, we are in trouble.
Dennis Prager
#32. My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.
Elfriede Jelinek
#33. One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.
Alfred De Vigny
#34. So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We honor the dead and abhor the dying.
- from the story De Composition
David Benioff
#35. The way I listen to music goes in waves depending on a lot of things. How busy I am, if I'm in between composition projects, if I'm starting a new project. So, the only time I listen to the radio for music is with my daughter's when I'm driving them to school, or driving them somewhere.
Tod Machover
#36. I began seriously concentrating on music study after I entered senior high school. I went to a class in the arts section at the YMCA and learned music theory and composition. Today, there are many classes like this available, but this was not so much the case in those days.
Isao Tomita
#37. Ah, one doesn't give up one's country any more than one gives UP one's grandmother. They're both antecedent to choice - elements of one's composition that are not to be eliminated.
Henry James
#39. My parents had raised me to not judge a person based off the color of their skin but by the composition of their character. A man was nothing if he wasn't true to his word and honorable.
Chelle Bliss
#40. He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep.
Hector Hugh Munro
#41. From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition.
James Nasmyth
#42. Thus then a single harmony orders the composition of the whole ... by the mingling of the most contrary principles.
Aristotle.
#43. A composition - and every work of art is one - is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.
Jostein Gaarder
#44. A long time ago a very powerful race of Indians lived here. They were from another cycle; their being was of another composition. They are still here, even now, you can see them on the mountain rims.
Frederick Lenz
#45. As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you're trying to do, if that makes sense. It's a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.
Robert Stromberg
#46. The techniques have galloped ahead of the concepts. We have moved away from studying the complexity of the organism; from processes and organisation to composition.
James Black
#47. The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#48. Tree trunks are composed of layers of growth. Meaningful expressions are composed of layers of words. Say something meaningful.
D'Andre Lampkin
#49. Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.
Aaron Belz
#50. ... the cardinal labor of composition, which is excision ...
Virginia Woolf
#51. The composition is already there, you just need to crop it
Jay Maisel
#52. Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn't a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn't want to have some contrived composition.
Dave Grohl
#53. At the risk of some oversimplification, if the skill composition of our work force meshed fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital-stock, wage-skill differentials would be stable, and the percentage changes in wage rates would be the same for all job grades.
Alan Greenspan
#54. It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.
Julian Barnes
#55. The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom in a single moment.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#56. Though I cannot claim to be a Christian in the sectarian sense, the example of Jesus suffering is a factor in the composition of my undying faith in non-violence which rules all my actions, worldly and temporal.
Mahatma Gandhi
#57. If it hadn't worked out professionally, I would be teaching music theory and composition in a small college somewhere and playing drums in a jazz trio at the Holiday Inn on weekends, and I'd be happy there, too.
J. D. Souther
#58. When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like 'Saint George and the Dragon' or 'The Rape of the Sabine Women,' but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. You are every color and brushstroke.
Chuck Palahniuk
#59. I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#60. To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.
Edward Weston
#61. Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.
Robert Rauschenberg
#62. The composition is the organized sum of the interior functions of every part of the work.
Wassily Kandinsky
#63. Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.
Vincent Van Gogh
#64. I don't think I differentiate between composition and improvisation. Improvisation could be a large part of a composition.
Yoshi Wada
#65. Because of my compact and muscular body composition, my short hair, and my "Johawk," I have been mistaken for a boy on many occasions. Each time it happens, it feels like I have been punched in the gut. It is extremely discouraging.
Joanna Lohman
#66. The composition of the primary is so different than when I was first elected governor in 1978.
Lamar Alexander
#67. Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men.
Alexander Herzen
#68. Man is a creature adapted for life under circumstances which are very narrowly limited. A few degrees of temperature more or less, a slight variation in the composition of air, the precise suitability of food, makes all the difference between health and sickness; between life and death.
Robert Stawell Ball
#69. One of the most beautiful things that recruited me to join the LaRouche movement is its emphasis on Classical singing and composition, especially with the Negro Spirituals, adding a new depth of profundity to songs I had sang while growing up.
Kesha Rogers
#70. The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.
Hans Hofmann
#71. Cheerfulness, sir, is the principle ingredient in the composition of health.
Arthur Murphy
#72. Whatever the composition of a firm, if it is to do good business it should be a place where everyone is encouraged to progress toward complexity- or at the very least a place that does not make it more difficult to achieve personal growth.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#74. I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.
Giorgio Morandi
#75. Certainty' with respect to successful language learning and use--whether oral, written, or technologically mediated combinations--applies less and less to discrete products and more to adaptive processes.
Jay Jordan
#76. A great composition to me is.. an incarnation of a genius, of all that was ever in him of the slightest consequence.
Neville Cardus
#77. The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
William Hazlitt
#78. Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which ... can be dispensed with.
Harold Rosenberg
#79. I tell people to frame the picture. Make the greatest, most perfect composition you can ... and then take a step forward. It skews it a bit and makes it more interesting.
Larry Clark
#80. I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
Joan Collins
#81. You know, the character of Isabelle in 'Love Crime' is the only character I feel the furthest from. I have nothing to share with her, so it was really difficult. Being an actor of composition is something, but you always base yourself on something you know about.
Ludivine Sagnier
#82. When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.
Michael Chabon
#83. You haven't time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#84. It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.
John Ruskin
#85. sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present, which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.
Virginia Woolf
#86. Many developing countries are enjoying demographic changes. They have a younger demographic composition so they're not burdened by legacy policy. Now, if you combine this with a good macro policy and ambitious structural policy, those countries are able to move more flexibly and be more agile.
Sri Mulyani Indrawati
#87. I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.
David Shields
#89. these kits can be useful for gauging the diversity and general composition of your microbiome.
David Perlmutter
#90. When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
Frederic Chopin
#91. Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.
Brian Eno
#92. Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.
Francis Crick
#93. Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon
#94. There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm.
Alton Tobey
#95. On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays? It must be emphasized here above all that to attain really decisive progress greater funds must be made available.
Victor Francis Hess
#96. I have found that meditation has helped me with my academic career and has given me insights into musical composition and software design.
Frederick Lenz
#97. A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the pox content which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution.
Lord Chesterfield
#98. My greatest lesson in composition was looking at paintings.
Larry Clark
#99. The composition happens as the work progresses. Often the messy background makes it easy to disperse shapes as needed. I'd rather it took over me than I took over it.
Myfanwy Pavelic
#100. Imust have a London audience.I could never preach, but to the educated; to those who were capable of estimating my composition.
Jane Austen
