Sound Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

Sound and sufficient reason falls, after all, to the share of but few men, and those few men exert their influence in silence.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The name [Pop] sounds so awful. Dada must have something to do with Pop. it's so funny, the names are really synonyms. Does anyone know what they're supposed to mean or have to do with, those names? Johns and Rauschenberg, Neo-Dada for all those years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use, are now called progenitors of Pop. It's funny the way things change. I think John Cage has been very influential, and Merce Cunningham too, I think.... History books are being rewritten all the time.

If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

William Shakespeare

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment — twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.

Theodor W. Adorno

The heart has its sabbaths and jubilees in which the world appears as a hymeneal feast, and all natural sounds and the circle of the seasons are erotic odes and dances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention.

George Bernard Shaw

And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,
And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,
And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire
Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.

Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.

Raymond Chandler

By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave One scent to hyson and to wall-flower, One sound to pine-groves and to water-falls, One aspect to the desert and the lake. It was her stern necessity : all things Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower, Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character Deceive us, seeming to be many things, And are but one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep'st so sound.

William Shakespeare

Darling, she drawled, won't that be rather tiresome? If any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! It sounds heartless, but it saves such a lot of trouble later!

Agatha Christie

Art and science work in quite different ways: agreed. But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences.... In my view, the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.

The mission of Science is to study and sound everything.

How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

It's like in golf. A lot of people — I don't want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It's weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can't sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

Albert Einstein

No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am so afraid of people's words.
They describe so distinctly everything:
And this they call dog and that they call house,
here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words,
they know everything, what will be, what was;
no mountain is still miraculous;
and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be!
I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.
But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.
That's how you kill.

Rainer Maria Rilke