Gregorian Quotes & Sayings

One of my greatest sources of pride as president of the New York Public Library is the continuance of the library's open, free, and democratic posture, the fact that we are here for Everyman, that we are indeed Everyman's university, the place where the scholar who is not college-affiliated can come and work and feel at home. — Vartan Gregorian

The only condition a library asks its users to honor is to do justice to their own imagination, their own curiosity and their own thirst for knowledge, and in the process, to achieve their own independence of mind and spirit. — Vartan Gregorian

'Canticum Sacrum' is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern - and all in 17 minutes. — John Tavener

Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity. — Vartan Gregorian

The library is not only a diary of the human race, but marks an act of faith in the continuity of humanity. — Vartan Gregorian

You meet not so much to sing as to pray, or, better yet, to pray in and through your song. Gregorian chant is for you a privileged form of prayer. You are drawn to it because you perceive the link between music and the sacred, between beauty and truth. — Jacques Hourlier

That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed - to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come. — Vartan Gregorian

It was a music of the spirit, seeking peace, not emotional release, expressing the hunger of the soul rather than the heart. A way of sequencing notes so ancient it might be music's mother lode, its Fertile Crescent. It wouldn't have grated, I felt, on the ears of ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Mesopotamians or Sumerians - or even on the august auditory equipment of the Buddha or Lao-tzu. — Tony Hendra

In the convent, y'all,
I tend the gardens,
watch things grow,
pray for the immortal soul
of rock 'n' roll.

They call me
Sister Presley here,
The Reverend Mother
digs the way I move my hips
just like my brother.

Gregorian chant
drifts out across the herbs
Pascha nostrum immolatus est...
I wear a simple habit,
darkish hues,

a wimple with a novice-sewn
lace band, a rosary,
a chain of keys,
a pair of good and sturdy
blue suede shoes.

I think of it
as Graceland here,
a land of grace.
It puts my trademark slow lopsided smile
back on my face.

Lawdy.
I'm alive and well.
Long time since I walked
down Lonely Street
towards Heartbreak Hotel.

- Elvis's Twin Sister — Carol Ann Duffy

She had said that she preferred to be alone for so many years that it was now one of those things that equally well might or might not be true. — Joyce Ballou Gregorian

And so I realise that I want for myself the vibrant substratum of the word repeated in a Gregorian chant. I'm aware that everything I know I cannot say, I know only by paining or pronouncing syllables blind of meaning. And if here I have to use words for you, they must create an almost exclusively bodily meaning. I'm battling with the ultimate vibration. To tell you my substratum I make a sentence of words composed only of the now-instants. — Clarice Lispector

The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action. — Pope Paul VI

The library is our house of intellect, our transcendental university, with one exception: no one graduates from a library. No one possibly can, and no one should. — Vartan Gregorian

In our democratic society, the library stands for hope, for learning, for progress, for literacy, for self-improvement and for civic engagement. The library is a symbol of opportunity, citizenship, equality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and hence, is a symbol for democracy itself. — Vartan Gregorian

Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a prototype of a remote control might think to herself, Hey, there's some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there's some extra capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian and Gregorian calendars? — Chip Heath

Libraries and museums are the DNA of our culture. — Vartan Gregorian

An authentic updating of sacred music can take place only in the lineage of the great tradition of the past, of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony. — Pope Benedict XVI

him dumfounded as he chanted the Gregorian — John Howard Griffin

God gave Moses a calendar that began in spring. (Ex 12:2) God Himself emphasized the importance of Israel's new calendar at Ex 23:16; Le 23:34 and De 16:13. God's calendar was for marking, and keeping, God's holy days. Using a foreign calendar became illegal. Ignoring Israel's new calendar could cost an Israelite their life. (Nu 15:32-35)
Yet, the Jewish calendar is not the only calendar. There are plenty of calendars to choose from: Assyrian; Egyptian; Iranian; Armenian; Ethiopian; Hindu; Coptic; Mayan; Chinese; Julian; Byzantine; Islamic and Gregorian; just to mention a few. Has the Seventh Day Adventists settled on any one of these calendars? Which one?
pg 5 — Michael Ben Zehabe

The book is here to stay. What we're doing is symbolic of the peaceful coexistence of the book and the computer. — Vartan Gregorian

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality. — Simone Weil

It is very important that, no matter what happens, you keep your feeling of self worth and value. — Vartan Gregorian

She had gone to a dinner party in her honor the night before the opening, and everyone had asked, with precisely the same intonation, as though it was a piece of urban Gregorian chant, Where have you been? — Anna Quindlen

It meant that New York philanthropists, New York society, would now rediscover the library ... that learning, books, education have glamour, that self-improvement has glamour, that hope has glamour. — Vartan Gregorian

Everybody is somebody, so you don't have to introduce anybody. — Vartan Gregorian

Dignity is not negotiable. Dignity is the honor of the family. — Vartan Gregorian

A teenage girl creaming while she listens to some boy-band, a monk digging on the God he hears in Gregorian chants, or John fucking Coltrane himself climbing up into the sky on a staircase made of sixteenth notes, it's all the same. If it takes you there, it's good. — Tad Williams

No day before October 10, 1582, actually occurred on the Gregorian calendar for that was when the calendar was implemented officially. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Like the Birth Of Venus, the song [Yello "oh, Yeah"] denotes the birth of the bro. The song just reminds me of bros looking out over lowered Ray-Bans. It birthed a negative sexual revolution. I was going to a lot of bondage clubs at the time and they did play this song. The song I associate more is that horrible Enigma song with the Gregorian chant. There's something good buried in that song and I might not hate it as much if I hadn't been a sex worker. — Margaret Cho

The universe is not going to see someone like you again in the entire history of creation. — Vartan Gregorian

The library is central to our free society. It is a critical element in the free exchange of information at the heart of our democracy. — Vartan Gregorian

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music. — Elie Wiesel

It is largely dissynchronous timing standards that have kept human beings off-balance and alienated from the natural cycles of the Earth they inhabit. The worst culprit is the Gregorian calendar, and by extension the "12:60 frequency" that it fosters - together these have become, in essence, the inescapable time clock of globalist capitalism. — Jose Arguelles