What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
--Vincent van Gogh

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivety. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
--Henri Matisse

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.
--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Just don't give up trying to do what you really want. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.
--Ella Fitzgerald

Music doesn't have to do anything for you or to you to become music. It exists without restrictions.
--Ornette Coleman

When we remember that we're all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.
--Mark Twain

When you are in music, you could live 100 lives and still never have enough time to do everything you want to. Music never leaves you alone, and that's a great privilege.
--James Conlon

He who plays the piano keep sane.
--Italian proverb

Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even profit, like a gold rush or invading a country...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
--Katherine Anne Porter

Never permit dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
--Pablo Picasso

Our doubt are our traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt
--Shakespeare

When I first found out I could make artwork about the frustration, anguish, and stupidity of my own life, I wept with relief.
--Julia Jacquette

The really important things in life are never planned. They just happen. So the only choice is to open to the experience of life, to the journey.
--Isabel Allende

I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to live down to expectation. If I can just hold out 'til I'm thirty, I'll be incredible.
--Wendy Wasserman

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
--Helen Keller

...a profession is about what you feel in your soul, and finding people who feel the same way.
--Libby Larsen

Don't think! Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things, you simply must do them.
--Ray Bradbury

Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not lovable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.
--Joseph Campbell

You are made of music--lonely music when you are lonely, vast music when you feel vast, even happy music sometimes. The whole stream of your life, already musical, is simply waiting for you to hear it.
--W.A. Mathieu, The Musical Life

Once you've had a Schubert song resonating through your body, once you've known what it's like to nail a high B flat and spin it out like silver, no pleasure come close.
--Marcia Menter, from an article in Glamour

You must take risks! If you don't take risks, you should stay in your room. You should stay in bed. You should die!
--Nadia Boulanger

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
--John Updike

Don't worry about your originality. You couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite or all you or anyone else can do.
--Robert Henri

I have walked this earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.
--Vincent van Gogh

Sometimes we can name the things we feel, like joy or sadness or love or hate or peacefulness. But there are other feelings so deep and special that we have no words for them, and that's where music is especially marvelous. It names the feelings for us, only in notes instead of words.
--Leonard Bernstein

Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
--Goethe

Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it.
--Tallulah Bankhead

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
--Bernard Berenson

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
--Scott Adams

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matte and those who matter don't mind.
--Dr. Seuss

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
--Mark Twain

Do or do not. There is no try.
--Yoda

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks.
--Philip Adams

Often we achieve an even better result when we stumble yet are willing to start over, when we don't give up after a mistake, when something doesn't come easily but we throw ourselves into trying, when we're not afraid to appear less than perfectly polished.
--Sharon Salzberg

Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.
--Oprah Winfrey

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
--Harold Wilson

There's always something to suggest that you'll never be who you wanted to be. Your choice is to take it or keep on moving.
--Phylicia Rashad

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better...while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.
--Woody Allen

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.
--Foster C. McCellan

If you follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.
--Joseph Campbell

If you care about something, protect it! If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, find the courage to live it.
--Owen Meany

Life is a petty thing unless is it moved by he indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.
--Jose Ortega y Gasset

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
--Calvin Coolidge

...if I did do anything differently, I wouldn't be me. I am the result of everything that's happened to me,the result of every experience of my life. If I went back and exchanged them for different experiences--that would be a different me. I can't be me without all the experiences I've had, both the bitter and the sweet.
--Midori

This is the most exultant time of your life; you should be exaggerating, not holding back.
--Isaac Stern

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
--Helen Keller

What interests me about music is how is simultaneously stimulates the intellect and stirs the emotions. I am fascinated by the way a kind of chord can cause a welling up of feeling.
--Marjourie Merryman

When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you, till is seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is the place the tide will turn.
--Harriet Beecher Stowe

Music is a gift we take with us throughout our lives. It is a gift to give away to the person who is listening. You don't play an instrument with your hands, you play with your heart.
--Benjamin Zander

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
--Eleanor Roosevelt

To play great music, you must keep your eyes on a distant star.
--Yehudi Menuhin

Most folks think music is spiritual and etheric, and it is, but it is also palpable and concrete. It bridges the infinite and the finite, the subtle and the coarse. Sometimes when you come home from a day in the trenches you need the subtlety of music; it releases you from the denseness of the earth.
--WA Mathieu, The Musical Life

Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you: Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.
--Marcus Aurelius

...[you] have chosen a life in music. Rather with music...because you live with it one way or another. You reject it, you accept it, you struggle with it daily, you struggle with each piece, you struggle to communicate.
--Libby Larsen

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
--Eleanor Roosevelt

...those ecstatic messages that tell us we are doing what we love and need and ought to do, don't come every day. If we expect and insist on that much 'reinforcement' every time we do something, we will never do anything. Those messages come only once in a while. We must learn to trust them. Having been shown the road, we have to stay on it, at least for a while, even if it is sometimes a little hard.
--John Holt, Never Too Late

A musicianer just has to learn for himself, just by playing and listening...There ain't no one can write down the feeling you have to have. That's from inside yourself. The music has to let you be...you got to stay free inside it..."
--Sidney Bechet

Music makes me forget myself, my actual position; it transports me into another state not my natural one; under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not really understand, that I can do what I can't do.
--Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

Violin love is not rational. Violin love is an infatuation, an obsession. The instrument is bewitching and intoxicating one moment, sullen and reticent the next. It is responsive, sensitive to every mood. I do not understand the violin, but I adore it.
--Susan M. Barbieri, from an article in Strings

Words seem so undefinable, so inexact, so easy to misunderstand compared with real music, which fills the soul with a thousand better feelings. What is expressed to me by music that I love is not too vague to be put into words, but on the contrary, too precise.
--Felix Mendelssohn

Silence, which will save me from shame, will also deprive me of fame.
--Igor Stravinsky

I like to think of music as a means of beating back time, making it expand or contract at will, making life feel longer than it actually is.
--Linda Katherine Cutting, Memory Slips

I never dreamt that with my own two hands I could touch the sky.
--Sappho

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
--Oscar Wilde

Do not pursue what is illusory--property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life--don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fill the cup to overflowing.
--Alexander Solzhenitsyn

...love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
-- Ludwig van Beethoven

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
--Richard Bach

I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get.
--Anne Tyler

My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.
--Miles Davis

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
--Vincent van Gogh

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me-- shapes and ideas so near to me--so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
--Georgia O'Keeffe

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
--Pablo Picasso

We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every now and then I listen to a piece of music, and it kills me. ...the emotion, the beauty of it all...wherever it is. My body just reacts to it. And I say to myself, God, I'm so lucky that I am able to experience this. That feeling has never gone away.
-- Itzhak Perlman