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| These quotes, the ones I can remember, were on the band room wall. As I remember or track down more, I will post them. Godspeed. Stephen Melillo Also, please see: Book List "The most valuable things in life are priceless. They are courage, compassion, wisdom, respect for ourselves and others, and a host of characteristics that we call the beauty of the human spirit." Herbie Hancock "What is to give Light must endure burning." Viktor Frankl... "Alas! All music jars when the soul's out of tune" - Cervantes "I shall hear in heaven!" - Ludwig van Beethoven "What
will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works
of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is
subject to the changes of time, and - more's the pity- the fashions
of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock
and no wanton hand will ever venture to defile it. Then, let every
man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the
goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the
gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never
cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal." - Ludwig
van Beethoven "No matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning." Robert H. Goddard "All of life is such that most people's lives are not remembered, and so many of us do wonderful things, and I just think to be remembered at all for anything would be a marvellous thing." John Williams "Each small act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of the good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it is passed, until simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil." Dean Koontz in the character of H.R. White in From the Corner of His Eye "The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore... Unlike the mediocre, intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible... It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors... to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown." Ferdinand Magellan, Explorer (c. 1520) "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the Heart." Helen Keller "Never 'for the sake of peace and quiet' deny your own experience or convictions." Dag Hammarskjold "The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own." Benjamin Disraeli "He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times." Johann von Schiller "We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give." Winston S. Churchill "Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which gaurantees all others." Winston S. Churchill "I have no fear of the future. Let us go forward into its mysteries, let us tear aside the veils which hide it from our eyes and let us move onward with confidence and courage." Winston S. Churchill "You do your worst - And we will do our best." Winston S. Churchill "There can be no courage unless you're scared." Eddie Rickenbacker "All significant battles are fought within self." Sheldon Kopp "The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise." Tacitus "Fear not that your life will come to an end but that it will never have a beginning." John Henry Newman "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." Eleanor Roosevelt "All that is not given is lost." Rabindranath Tagore "A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him." David Brinkley "What great cause would been fought and won under the banner, 'I stand for consensus'?" Margaret Thatcher "The first and best victory is to conquer self." Plato "Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates." H. Jackson Brown Jr. "The longest distance between two points is a shortcut." Nancy Dornan "I have wasted Time, and now doth Time waste me." William Shakespeare "We do not judge great art. It judges us." Caroline Gordon "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." Robert Browning "Show me a satisfied man, and I'll show you a failure." Albert Einstein "Imagination is more important than Knowledge." Albert Einstein "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." Albert Einstein "Adversity introduces a man to himself." Albert Einstein "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." Albert Einstein "When man loses his sense of awe there will be disaster." Lao-Tze "To love anyone is to hope in him always. From the moment we begin to judge anyone, to limit our confidence in him, from the moment at which we identify [pigeon-hole] him, and so reduce him to that, we cease to love him, and he ceases to be able to become better." A French Priest "In every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent advantage." Robert Collier "We choose to go to the moon and other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." John F. Kennedy "The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining." John F. Kennedy "If I had 8 hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend 6 sharpening the axe." Abraham Lincoln "I do the very best I know how, the very best I can... and I mean to keep on doing so until the end." Abraham Lincoln "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Abraham Lincoln "Plough deep while sluggards sleep." Benjamin Franklin "What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson "An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in the world." Madeleine L'Engle "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in Nature... Life is either daring adventure or nothing." Helen Keller "Those who aim at great deeds must suffer greatly." Crassus "We must either find a way or make our own." Hannibal "The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience." Leo Tolstoy "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work... the more I have of it." Thomas Jefferson "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer." U.S. ARMY "Always do more than is required of you." General George S. Patton "Never give in. Never, never, never, never! Never yield in any way, great or small, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force and the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." Winston Churchill "An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity. A pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity." Winston Churchill "He who is firm in will molds the world to himself." Goethe "The reasonable man adapts himself to his surroundings. The unreasonable man adapts his surroundings to himself. Progress depends upon the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw "Do what you can with what you have, with where you are." Teddy Roosevelt. "It's not the size of the man in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the man." Teddy Roosevelt "Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars and keep your feet on the ground." Teddy Roosevelt "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out where the strong stumbled, or how the doer could have done better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, his face marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and falls short again and again: there is no effort without error. But he who tries, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, at best knows the triumph of achievement, and at worst, fails while daring. His place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." Teddy Roosevelt "What you think of you become." Buddha "No cross, no crown." William Penn "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." Will Rogers "Slow and steady wins the race." Aesop "The beginning is the most important part of the work." Plato "One joy dispels a hundred cares." Confucius "Lost time is never found again." Aughey "No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking." Voltaire "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of man can achieve." Napoleon Hill "Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." Jonathan Swift "Music is well said to be the Speech of Angels." Thomas Carlyle "He had always wanted to write Music and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikowsky's First Concerto, or the last movement of Rachmaninoff's Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the Music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that Music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers - Show me yours - show me that it is possible - show me your achievement - and the knowledge will give me courage for mine." Ayn Rand "All that is not eternal is eternally out-of-date." CS Lewis "Accomplishment will prove to be a journey, not a destination." Dwight D. Eisenhower "Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory." Mohandas Gandhi "Your life is a work of art, a craft to be carefully mastered. For patience has replaced time, and you are your own destination. Rick Jarow "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." Thomas Edison "Our greatest glory is not in never falling... but in rising every time we fall." Confucius "Lies are the greatest murder. They kill the Truth." Socrates "Count that day lost whose low descending sun views from thy hand no worthy action." Anonymous "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." Walter Begehot "One day while imitating everyone else, the monkey slit his own throat." Anonymous "Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right." Henry Ford "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" William Shakespeare "He broke fresh ground-because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood. He had no need for the divided responsibility in which others seek to be safe from ridicule, because he had been granted a faith which required no confirmation-a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand: a union in self-surrender without self- destruction, where his heart was lucid and his mind was loving." from Dag Hammarskjöld "We can do no great thing... only small things with great Love." Mother Teresa "One minute of waiting is a century to the Hopeful." Chinese "Better
three hours too soon than a minute too late." William
Shakespeare "In clear water little fish have no place to hide." Chinese "Clutch at water and it escapes through your fingers." Chinese "In some attempts, it is glorious even to fail." Longinis "Private
and public life are subject to the same rules; and truth and manliness
are two qualities that will carry you through this world much better
than policy, or tact, or expediency, or any other word that was
ever devised to conceal or mystify a deviation from the straight
line."
Robert E. Lee "My
grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try
to be in the first group; there was less competition there."
Indira Gandhi We are spirits. That bodies should be lent to us so long as they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or in doing good to our fellowmen, is a kind and benevolent act of God. When they become unfit for these purposes, and afford us pain instead of pleasure, and instead of an aid become an incumbrance, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we may depart from them. Death is that way. It is as if our friend and we were invited to a houseparty, which is to last forever. His chair was ready first, and he has gone before us. We could not all conveniently start together. And we should not be grieved at this, since we some day will follow, and know where to find him. Benjamin Franklin To
be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night
and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest
battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
E.E. Cummings From S: Success is often a thing individuals settle for when they can't imagine a venture Noble enough, a daring idea Worthy enough to fail at. Great Music recreates the past, reveals the ever-present, and plots the Human Adventure soon to unfold. What is Beauty? It launches the hero on the Quest, and if she achieves it, then she too will make things of Beauty which will summon the next generation of heroes to a Life of Questing. What
can go wrong will... so don't let it. (Heck with Murphy) "The reasonable man adapts himself to his surroundings. The unreasonable man adapts his surroundings to himself. Progress depends upon the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw Circumvention is the Mother of all Learning. Whenever an Obstacle is presented, be it Person or Thing, Situation or Condition, the Soul who is meant to Endure will find a way to circumnavigate the waters of the small-minded. Is it any wonder then that small minds should see smallness in things? That small hearts would beat only for the moment and not for the Eternity for which they were designed? That small souls would run from the very Music that reveals the Soul from which all else flows...? Music happens when God's Prayer to Man becomes Man's prayer to God. - SLM 2000. Make yourself someone you can trust. Then start listening to yourself. Composition is the Art of Architecturing the Spilling of Blood in such a manner as to make the act of Dying Live into Forever. SLM 2004 People talk about “tests” all the Time. It would be neat if you could “pass through”... But when your LIFE is the test, you must have great Vision... SLM 2005 This was not on the band room wall... but it has been with me always. "Lord, make me instrument of Thy Peace; Where there is hatred, let me sow Love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, Faith; Where there is despair; Hope; Where there is darkness, Light; Where there is sadness, Joy. O Divine master, Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. It is in dying that we are born to eternal Life." Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi
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