Sousa Music Quotes & Sayings

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds. — John Philip Sousa

The average music-lover hears only the production under prevailing conditions. — John Philip Sousa

Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing. — John Philip Sousa

I forsee a marked deterioration in American musicand a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue - or rather by vice - of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines — John Philip Sousa

I firmly believe that we have more latent musical talent in America than there is in any other country. But to dig it out there must be good music throughout the land, a lot of it. Everyone must hear it, and such a process takes time. — John Philip Sousa

As I holed up in the City of Angels, I was also aware of a comforting feeling of anonymity. In the world's biggest third-class city I could pass unnoticed. I spoke the language. I was familiar with the currency. I could drink the water. I could almost breathe the air, late April air, compounded of interesting hydrocarbons. — John D. MacDonald

All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience. — Robert Holdstock

I had found English audiences highly satisfactory. They are the best listeners in the world. Perhaps the music-lovers of some of our larger cities equal the English, but I do not believe they can be surpassed in that respect. — John Philip Sousa

Ah dearest heart if you will but wait
I'll become the ideal soulmate
nevermore causing you a moment's trouble
and I but a mere ectoplasmic bubble
swaying above your gorgeous head
gruff and garrulous and safely dead. — Christy Brown

Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music. — John Philip Sousa

Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains — John Philip Sousa

You cannot solve a problem in the same frequency in which it was created. — Lynn Grabhorn

At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good ... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it. — Woodrow Wilson

Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again. — Stephen M. Irwin

Your brain is like a plant. If you plant a seed in it, it will grow into a big idea. — Jane Kang

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. — Wolfgang Pauli

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process. — Stephen Jay Gould

Film is so immersive. — Mike Birbiglia

To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false. — John Philip Sousa

I can almost always write music; at any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, music comes. — John Philip Sousa

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds? — John Philip Sousa

There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying. — John Philip Sousa

On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there. — Jim Lehrer

Tragedy makes for strange bedfellows. — Lorraine Heath

The office of President is a great one; to every true American it seems the greatest on earth. And to me, as I was engaged in weaving a background of music for the pageantry of it, there came a deeper realization of the effect of that office on the man. — John Philip Sousa

A pulse of surprise, of wicked delight against my mental shields, at the dark, membranous wings I knew were now poking over my shoulders. Every icy kiss of rain sent jolts of cold through me. Sensitive-so sensitive, these Illyrian wings.
Lucien backed up at step. "What did you do to yourself?" I gave him a little smile. "The human girl you knew died Under the Mountain. I have no interest in spending immortality as a High Lord's pet — Sarah J. Maas

How has retirement affected my golf game? A lot more people beat me now. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else. — John Philip Sousa

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech. — Marshall McLuhan