Top 100 Quotes About Neil Peart: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Neil Peart

#1. I was always impressed by some of the progressive styles of guys like Neil Peart.

#2. He often referred to Rush's three members - Neil Peart, Alex Lifeson, and Geddy Lee - as "the Holy Trinity" or "the Gods of the North.

Ernest Cline

#3. The records that I grew up listening to had feel, and the drummers that inspired me - like Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins and Roger Taylor - all had their own voice and individual style.

Taylor Hawkins

#4. No one gets to their heaven without a fight.

Neil Peart

#5. From the point of ignition.
To the final drive.
The point of the journey is not to arrive.

Neil Peart

#6. Courageous convictions will drag the dream into existence.

Neil Peart

#7. You have to know when you're at the top of your particular mountain, I guess. Maybe not the summit, but as high as you can go.

Neil Peart

#8. When I started playing, I played in R&B bands. I played James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and all that.

Neil Peart

#9. If it's cross-country ski season, I'll be out doing that, or snowshoeing up in Quebec. In my California home, I go to the local Y and I like doing yoga. It's been hugely beneficial to me in injury avoidance.

Neil Peart

#10. There's still a lot I'm angry about, a lot of human behaviour that's appalling and despicable, but you choose what you can fight against. I always thought if I could just put something in words perfectly enough, people would get the idea and it would change things.

Neil Peart

#11. Lessons taught but never learned, all around us anger burns. Guide the future by the past. Long ago the mould was cast.

Neil Peart

#12. Better the pride that resides as a citizen of the world than a pride that divides when a colorful rag is unfurled

Neil Peart

#13. It's interesting. I've known quite a few good athletes that can't begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up.

Neil Peart

#14. You just become adaptable and try to lead a good life in ways that make sense, regardless. Because I know at the end of it, if I'm going to meet Jesus or Allah or Buddha, I'm going to be all right.

Neil Peart

#15. The government's only functions are to protect the rights of the individual; therefore, you need a police force and an army.

Neil Peart

#16. Geddy once joked, 'You're the only guy I know who rehearses to rehearse!

Neil Peart

#17. What a young musician's dream, to say, "Look at those chrome drums. Look at that 22-inch ride cymbal. I'll have those." It was one of those unparalleled exciting days of your life.

Neil Peart

#18. It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later. I started playing drums at 13, and when I got to the international touring level ... I got interested in cross-country skiing, long-distance swimming, bicycling ... things that require stamina, not finesse.

Neil Peart

#19. I believe in taxation and health care that is outside the usual libertarian mandate, because I don't want people to have to suffer. It's as simple as that.

Neil Peart

#20. In 2007, I studied with Peter Erskine because I was doing a Buddy Rich tribute concert, and I wanted to take my big-band drumming up a level. I went over to Peter's house with my sticks, feeling like a 13-year-old again.

Neil Peart

#21. Too much attention and hoopla doesn't agree with my temperament.

Neil Peart

#22. People don't realize the limitations of 200 words, and the way they get chiselled down into a song that has to be sung.

Neil Peart

#23. I think everything I do has Howard Roark [hero of The Fountainhead] in it, you know, as much as anything. The person I write for is Howard Roark.

Neil Peart

#24. Dedicated to the future, with honor to the past.

Neil Peart

#25. Innocence gave me confidence to go up against reality.

Neil Peart

#26. What is a master but a master student? And if that's true, then there's a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession.

Neil Peart

#27. The real test of a musician is live performance. It's one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.

Neil Peart

#28. Live shows were always religion for us. We never played a show - whether it was in front of 15 people or 15,000 - where it wasn't everything we had that night.

Neil Peart

#29. You can't get wise with sleep still in your eyes no matter what your dream might be.

Neil Peart

#30. I'm still no good at ball-and-stick games. If I go play golf with the guys, it's intended to be a joke.

Neil Peart

#31. To me, the highest expression of life is art with jokes. It's very rarified, very difficult to accomplish if you want to be more than just funny and more than just jokes about human gaseousness.

Neil Peart

#32. Your soul is stained with the blood of the innocent, feel their pain

Neil Peart

#33. The tarot card 'The Tower' seemed a chilling reflection of the events of September 11, 2001.

Neil Peart

#34. The reality is that my style of drumming is largely an athletic undertaking, and it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to ... take yourself out of the game.

Neil Peart

#35. Extroverts never understand introverts, and it was like that in school days. I read recently that all of us can be defined in adult life by the way others perceived us in high school.

Neil Peart

#36. Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.

Neil Peart

#37. I'm learning all the time. I'm evolving all the time as a human being. I'm getting better, I hope, in all of the important ways.

Neil Peart

#38. You can do a lot in a lifetime, if you don't burn out too fast/You can make the most of the distance/First you need endurance/First you've got to last.

Neil Peart

#39. We're only immortal for a limited time.

Neil Peart

#40. Those who know what's best for us must rise and save us from ourselves.

Neil Peart

#41. Howard Roark stood as a role model for me - as exactly the way I already was living. Even at that tender age [18] I already felt that. And it was intuitive or instinctive or inbred stubbornness or whatever; but I had already made those choices and suffered for them.

Neil Peart

#42. When I'm riding my motorcycle, I'm glad to be alive. When I stop riding my motorcycle, I'm glad to be alive.

Neil Peart

#43. I want to be an improviser, and I've worked very hard at that. It's an art. You don't just play whatever comes into your head; you have to be very deliberate about what you do.

Neil Peart

#44. The ones we wish could hear us have heard it all before.

Neil Peart

#45. There is no blood in jazz drumming, and there are no bullies in jazz drumming.

Neil Peart

#46. Let your heart be the anchor and the beat of your song.

Neil Peart

#47. Sometimes you're up against everybody in the whole world - even your friends and family are saying, "You need a single." You feel sometimes incredibly alone.

Neil Peart

#48. Drumming completely eclipsed my life from age 13, when I started drum lessons. Everything disappeared. I'd done well in school up until that time. I was fairly adjusted socially up until that time. And I became completely monomania, obsessed all through my teens. Nothing else existed anymore.

Neil Peart

#49. And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start to mold a new reality closer to the heart.

Neil Peart

#50. Even as a kid, I never wanted to be famous; I wanted to be good.

Neil Peart

#51. I'm a linear thinking agnostic, but not an atheist folks.

Neil Peart

#52. Thoreau, At death, our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us, and are found out, or depart farther from us, and are forgotten.

Neil Peart

#53. I'd be very honored to be the ambassador to drum solos.

Neil Peart

#54. When Mr. Ludwig invented the bass-drum pedal, that's what made the drum set possible.

Neil Peart

#55. For me, drum elements are like hieroglyphics - I think of a certain physical figure, and a little three-dimensional glyph will appear in my mind as I'm playing.

Neil Peart

#56. Don't try to change Doofus, let Doofus change you.

Neil Peart

#57. The important thing is: if you fail once, or if your luck is bad this time, the dream is still there. A dream is only over if you give it up-or if it comes true.

Neil Peart

#58. It's always a happy day when YYZ appears on our luggage tags.

Neil Peart

#59. If I do something weird, play it twice and it's a new part.

Neil Peart

#60. I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.

Neil Peart

#61. Hay farms, scrub forest, and some bald-looking areas of

Neil Peart

#62. To get nostalgic about other people's music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future. I have no patience with that kind of attitude, whether it's on radio or among friends.

Neil Peart

#63. You can surrender without a prayer, but never really pray without surrender. You can fight without ever winning, but never ever win without a fight.

Neil Peart

#64. I don't like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes.

Neil Peart

#65. Once, I went speeding past an old couple and smiled as I imagined their conversation: him grumbling about me and her telling him not to be such an old grouch. Then, suddenly I was in tears, thinking, 'I'll never get to be a grumpy old grandpa!'

Neil Peart

#66. All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted. Not so boldly charted, it's really just a question of your honesty.

Neil Peart

#67. I expect if you're a professional public speaker, you probably wouldn't want to go onstage and sing and play drums.

Neil Peart

#68. I had spindly little ankles, and growing up in Canada, I couldn't skate. I was no good at any sports so was very much a pariah through those adolescent years.

Neil Peart

#69. 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

#70. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal - because I'm an idealist.

Neil Peart

#71. If drummers are 'anti-solo,' that's up to them. They're musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on 'The Tonight Show', or Gene Krupa.

Neil Peart

#72. I still totally believe in individual rights and individual responsibility and in choosing to do good.

Neil Peart

#73. You can twist perception
reality wont budge
you can raise objection
I won2t be judge and jury

Neil Peart

#74. I had come to appreciate the long open stretches of two-lane highway across the sagey sea and mountain-studded plateau of the Great Basin, but the towns and cities were another thing. I liked the natural face of Nevada, but was not as impressed by the human face.

Neil Peart

#75. Like a force of nature
Love can fade with the stars at dawn.

Neil Peart

#76. Half the world cries Half the world laughs Half the world tries To be the other half

Neil Peart

#77. To me, drum soloing is like doing a marathon and solving equations at the same time.

Neil Peart

#78. The thing for me about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy is the only one applicable to the world today - in every sense. If you take her ideas, then take them farther in your own mind, you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis.

Neil Peart

#79. Your place in life is where you want to be !

Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson Neil Peart

#80. But glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity.

Neil Peart

#81. Getting through Lake Tahoe was already like L.A., with construction all over the place,

Neil Peart

#82. Rudimental snare work is something I've always loved.

Neil Peart

#83. If the future's looking dark,
We're the ones who have to shine.
If there's no one in control,
We're the ones who draw the line.
Though we live in trying times,
We're the ones who have to try.
And we know that time has wings,
So we're the ones who have to fly.

Neil Peart

#84. I try not to repeat myself in fills in all the Rush songs unless it is something simple or something I feel is my own characteristic thing.

Neil Peart

#85. For a person of my sensibility, you're only left with the Democratic party.

Neil Peart

#86. I have come to believe that anger and grudges are burning embers in the heart ...

Neil Peart

#87. More a paraphrase than a quote, really, but it comes from a prayer which was stitched into a sampler above my grandmother's bed. It began like this: 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep ... '

Neil Peart

#88. How can anybody be enlightened?
Truth is after all so poorly lit

Neil Peart

#89. Do yourself a favor. Don't ever say to me, 'Everything happens for a reason.'

Neil Peart

#90. It seems to me that's the only way you can have a truly creative aggregate of people is if they're all contributing in different ways.

Neil Peart

#91. Waiting for the winds of change to sweep the clouds away. Waiting for the rainbow's end to cast its gold your way ... You don't get something for nothing. You can't have freedom for free

Neil Peart

#92. All four winds together can't bring the world to me Shadows cast a play of light, so much I want to see Chase the sun around the world, I want to look at life-In the Available Light. I'll go with the wind, I'll stand in the light.

Neil Peart

#93. Adventures suck when you're having them.

Neil Peart

#94. One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Neil Peart

#95. It is impossible to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and be a Republican. It's philosophically absolutely opposed - if they could only think about what they were saying for a minute. That's when you get caught up in the webs of what people call themselves and how they behave.

Neil Peart