Holst Quotes & Sayings

Always ask for advice but never take it. — Gustav Holst

Hang up and drive! — Corey Holst

I want to prove that Holst's 'The Planets' can be as much of a sensory overload as a concert by the Grateful Dead, and just as exciting. — Charles Hazlewood

The Heavenly Spheres make music for us,
The Holy Twelve dance with us,
All things join in the dance!
Ye who dance not, know not what we are knowing. — Gustav Holst

He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.
Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes. — Craig Raine

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound. — Nicholson Baker

The enormity of the universe revealed by science cannot readily be grasped by the human brain, but the music of The Planets enables the mind to acquire some comprehension of the vastness of space where rational understanding fails. — Gustav Holst

One of the advantages of being over forty is that one begins to learn the difference between knowing and realising. — Gustav Holst

I've learned what 'classical' means. It means something that sings and dances through sheer joy of existence. — Gustav Holst

Music-making as a means of getting money is hell — Gustav Holst

Music, being identical with heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It's a condition of eternity. — Gustav Holst

I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain, the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. Like the late Erich von Holst, I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so! — Konrad Lorenz

Failure is the most important part of an artist's training, and one you cannot afford to do without. — Gustav Holst

Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you. — Gustav Holst

There is no room in music for the second-rate - it might just as well be the nineteenth-rate. — Gustav Holst