Oratorio Quotes & Sayings

Sorrow is only one of the lower notes in the oratorio of our blessedness. — Adoniram Judson Gordon

The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one's mind with other men's thoughts is to have no thoughts of one's own. — Woodrow Wilson

...the old are destroying the young by them to die in distant fields, and in response the young are destroying themselves. — Salman Rushdie

The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A novel is more a symphony, opera, oratorio. It exists in time, it goes by you a sound dying out as you write on, so that it is very hard to keep in touch with the whole thing ... — Dorothy Bryant

To save the people from themselves it would take a greater fear than the earth has ever seen. — Charles Manson

Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy. — Henry Ward Beecher

He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes. — Richard Wright

Email is the scourge of our age,' said Silvia. 'Email and cancer. — Olivia Sudjic

The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results. — John Rawls

I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a piercing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase
nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it. — R. J. Anderson

Happiness comes from ... some curious adjustment to life. — Hugh Walpole

So it became in my mind a nine-carol service; an oratorio and orchestral concert all in one, but with narration. That's something I've learned about, because it's the story that keeps you in there. I wrote a libretto and I gave it to John [Du Prez, Idle's co-writer of many years]. We normally don't work in this fashion but I said off you go, and he went off for about three months. He brought me back this demo which blew my mind. — Eric Idle

The way I understand gifts is that the giver must make a sacrifice, create an uneven exchange, bring himself closer to the recipient, create change and do it all with the right spirit. — Seth Godin

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow. — Fay Weldon

People need to see what's going on, and they have to be exposed to the mechanisms that can help make it right. — Harrison Ford

Jesus! it is the name which moves the harps of heaven to melody. Jesus! the life of all our joys. If there be one name more charming, more precious than another, it is this name. It is woven into the very warp and woof of our psalmody. Many of our hymns begin with it, and scarcely any, that are good for anything, end without it. It is the sum total of all delights. It is the music with which the bells of heaven ring; a song in a word; an ocean for comprehension, although a drop for brevity; a matchless oratorio in two syllables; a gathering up of the hallelujahs of eternity in five letters. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Jumping twenty or so years later, Ann Ciccolella, artistic director of Austin Shakespeare, approached me with the idea of staging Anthem. She had heard my film score to Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. And she said, I want to do Anthem as an oratorio. Well, I figured what she meant was a straight play with music. — Jeff Britting

Let equal fire our souls inflame,
And equal zeal employ,
That we the glorious spring may know,
Whose streams appear'd so bright below. — Georg Friedrich Handel

I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase - nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it.
I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose. And as long as I had a part in the music of the spheres, even if it was only a single grace note, I was not worthless. Nor was I alone. — R. J. Anderson