Bohuslav Martinu quotes

Bohuslav Martinu quotes

last updated: November 28, 2023

“The artist is always searching for the meaning of life, his own and that of mankind, searching for truth. A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanization and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music.”
-- Bohuslav Martinu

#Mean Quotes #Artist Quotes #Pressure Quotes

“A country scratching a lazy irritation at sagging doorjambs and late trains, whose greatest attribute is a collective, smelly tolerance, where a chap will put up with almost everything, which means he won't care about anything enough to get out of a chair.A country of public insouciance and private, grubby guilt, where you can believe anything as long as you don't believe it too fervently. A country where the highest aspiration is for a quiet life.”
“Television in the 1960s & 70s had just as much dross and the programmes were a lot more tediously patronising than they are now. Memory truncates occasional gems into a glittering skein of brilliance. More television, more channels means more good television and, of course, more bad. The same equation applies to publishing, film and, I expect, sumo wrestling.”
“The whole bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man. God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all. No real relationship goes just one way. There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn't mean we can't use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways.”
“There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a billion people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you.”

Source : A. Whitney Brown (1991). “The Big Picture: An American Commentary”, Harper Perennial
“The artist draws a picture of a rose very nicely with all attention and artistic sense, and yet it does not become as perfect as the real rose. If that is the real fact, how can we say that the real rose has taken its shape without Intelligence behind the beauty?”
“My mum is an artist and very into creative expression and freedom.”
“Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”
“Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.”

Source : Ad Reinhardt, Barbara Rose (1991). “Art-as-art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt”, p.24, Univ of California Press
“Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.”
“I always practise penalties, but what people don't understand is that you can never recreate that pressure situation that you're under.”

You may also like:

Antonin Dvorak
Composer
Arnold Schoenberg
Composer
Arthur Honegger
Composer
Bela Bartok
Composer
Benjamin Britten
Composer
Camille Saint-Saens
Composer
Claude Debussy
Composer
Darius Milhaud
Composer
David Frost
Journalist
Dmitri Shostakovich
Composer
Eduard Hanslick
Music critic
Igor Stravinsky
Composer
Johannes Brahms
Composer
Maurice Ravel
Composer
Paul Hindemith
Composer
Sergei Prokofiev
Ballet composer
Zoltan Kodaly
Composer
Bedrich Smetana
Composer
Neeme Jarvi
Conductor