Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herbie Hancock

Jazz translates the moment into a sense of inspiration for not only the musicians but for the listeners.

Herbie Hancock

I think I was supposed to play jazz.

Herbie Hancock

Jazz to me is the spirit of freedom. I mean real freedom. Freedom to explore. Freedom to express. Freedom to pour out your guts.

Herbie Hancock

You can practice to learn a technique, but I'm more interested in conceiving of something in the moment.

Herbie Hancock

I don't look at music from the standpoint of being a musician; I look at it from the standpoint of being a human being.

Herbie Hancock

Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am.

Herbie Hancock

Music isn't about music, it's about life.

Herbie Hancock

There's so much spontaneity involved, what do you practice? How do you practice teamwork? How do you practice sharing? How do you practice daring? How do you practice being nonjudgmental?

Herbie Hancock

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

Herbie Hancock

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

Herbie Hancock

I try to practice with my life.

Herbie Hancock

Creativity shouldn't be following radio; it should be the other way around.

Herbie Hancock

Life is not about finding our limitations, it's about finding our infinity.

Herbie Hancock

I'm always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

Herbie Hancock

It's not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

Herbie Hancock

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

Herbie Hancock

Jazz is about being in the moment.

Herbie Hancock

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

Herbert Spencer

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

Herb Alpert

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

Herb Alpert

I wake up in the morning, I do a little stretching exercises, pick up the horn and play.

Henry David Thoreau

I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man: wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morningwith a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.

Henry David Thoreau

Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?

Henry David Thoreau

Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. It is the only assured tone. There are in it such strains as far surpass anyman's faith in the loftiness of his destiny. Things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn.

Henry David Thoreau

The hounding of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the horizon may have first suggested the notes of the hunting-horn to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. This natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient world before the horn was invented.

Henry David Thoreau

As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. The hero is the sole patron of music.

Henry David Thoreau

A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood.

Henry David Thoreau

The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?

Henry David Thoreau

Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!

Henry David Thoreau

You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.

Henry David Thoreau

I sailed on the North River last night with my flute, and my music was a tinkling stream which meandered with the river, and fell from note to note as a brook from rock to rock. I did not hear the strains after they had issued from the flute, but before they were breathed into it, for the original strain precedes the sound by as much as the echo follows after, and the rest is the perquisite of the rocks and trees and beasts. Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts, the very undertow of our life's stream.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.

Jean Genet

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.