"Musician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... myself an artist, sometimes a musician," went on the wistful voice. "Then again I think myself a great man an' doin' somethin' worth while in the world. Then there's times I've thought myself with a family of children an' planned how they should learn mor'n ever I did." He mused, then banishing ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... the drama, or romanticism, or local color, nor of railways. He himself had never got beyond Monsieur de Voltaire, Monsieur le Comte de Buffon, Payronnet, and the Chevalier Gluck, the Queen's favorite musician. ...
— Madame Firmiani • Honore de Balzac
... Lord Napier of Magdala and Sir Bartle Frere. Both bespeak firmness, hardihood, and command, just as Lord Brougham's hand, which will be found represented on the next page, suggest the jurist, orator, and debater. But it can scarcely be said that the great musician is apparent in Liszt's hand, which is also depicted on the following page. The fingers are short and corpulent, and the whole extremity seems more at variance with the abilities and temperament of the owner than any other represented in these ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the mere material of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they were right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country, ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... colourist who has mechanical and inventive genius as well, may so arrange them that they can be played by rule; that colour may have its Mozart or Beethoven—its classic melodies, its familiar tunes. The musician, as I have said—has gathered his tones from every audible thing in nature—and fitted and assorted and built them into a science; and why should not some painter who is also a scientist take the many variations of colour which lie open to his sight, and range and fit and combine, ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... An old musician, who discovered that she had a magnificent voice, took pride in teaching the child how to sing, and when on Sundays she would sing in the choir, he would enthusiastically exclaim, "Little Louison will be a good songstress some day, her voice sounds ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... and rainy vapours, call out shapes {58} And phantoms from the crags and solid earth As fast as a musician scatters sounds ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... them? We have here goodly witnesses. I speak not of my Lord of Albany, who has only said that he was, as well becomes him, by your Grace's side. And I say nothing of my Lord of Rothsay, who, as befits his rank, years, and understanding, was cracking nuts with a strolling musician. He smiles. Here he may say his pleasure; I shall not forget a tie which he seems to have forgotten. But here is my Lord of March, who saw my followers flying before the clowns of Perth. I can tell that earl that ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... were in flower about the age of twenty-five. There is scarcely an instance of a musician producing his chef-d'oeuvre after the age of thirty. Rossini was not twenty when he composed his Tancredi, and his Italiana ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... absurd to deny that it is possible for a man always to love the same woman, as it would be to affirm that some famous musician needed several violins in order to execute a piece of music or compose ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... environment Vandover might easily have become an author, actor or musician, since it was evident that he possessed the fundamental afflatus that underlies all branches of art. As it was, the merest chance ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... art are indeed very closely associated in China. Every literary man is supposed to be more or less a painter, or a musician of sorts; failing personal skill, it would go without saying that he was a critic, or at the lowest a lover, of one or the other art, or of both. All Chinese men, women and children seem to love flowers; and the poetry which has gathered around the blossoms of plum and almond alone ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... professor has his faults, but in his own simple home, the work of the day behind him, his family about him at his well-filled but not luxurious board, with some member of the family not unlikely to be an accomplished musician and with his own unrivalled store of learning at your service, when he raises his glass to you, filled with his best, with a smile and a hearty "Prosit," he is hard to beat as a host, to my thinking. Perhaps there is nothing ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... career was uncertain. He went to Germany half intending to become a professional musician. There he studied the theory of music, perfecting himself meanwhile in Gaelic and Hebrew, winning prizes in both of these languages. Yeats found him in France in 1898 and advised him to go to the Aran Islands, to live there as if he were ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... the seats were almost all occupied, for campers from all sides of the lake flocked there on the entertainment evenings. A band was dreaming over some tune, each musician evidently being ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... of pleasing, but not handsome, appearance; very sensitive, very neat, and methodical in all things; not very strong-willed, and very reserved to women. He is of very studious disposition, especially fond of philosophy, politics, and natural science; a good musician. Takes moderate exercise, but rather easily fatigued. Is generally healthy, but not overstrong. He is a vegetarian, and was brought up as a free-thinker. Until two years ago he was never attracted toward a girl; indeed, he disliked girls; but he is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his musicians twice through the overture, he had for ten minutes been sitting in silence, waiting for the curtain to go up. At last, his emotional nature cracking under the strain of this suspense, he had left his conductor's chair and plunged down under the stage by way of the musician's bolthole to ascertain what was causing ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... wall the firing off a bomb, and a ship moored in the distance. Ireland, in his notes on "Hogarth," says it was to ridicule Whiston's project for the discovery of the longitude, which then attracted attention, and had sent some people crazy. Then there is a mad musician with his music-book on his head; a sham pope; and a poor man on the stairs "crazed with care, and crossed by hopeless love," who has chalked "Charming Betty Careless" upon the wall. One figure looks like a woman, holding a tape in her hands, but ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... he is of medicine or building? Gorgias is compelled to admit that if he did not know them previously he must learn them from his teacher as a part of the art of rhetoric. But he who has learned carpentry is a carpenter, and he who has learned music is a musician, and he who has learned justice is just. The rhetorician then must be a just man, and rhetoric is a just thing. But Gorgias has already admitted the opposite of this, viz. that rhetoric may be abused, and that the ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... a musician, are you not?" asked the young man from Baltimore. "Didn't I hear you playing a violin in your room last night? Or was ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... greatest discovery in dynamical astronomy among the stars—viz., that the law of gravitation extends to the most distant stars, and that many of them describe elliptic orbits about each other. W. Herschel was born at Hanover in 1738, came to England in 1758 as a trained musician, and died in 1822. He studied science when he could, and hired a telescope, until he learnt to make his own specula and telescopes. He made 430 parabolic specula in twenty-one years. He discovered 2,500 nebulae and 806 double ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... which the still small voice of melody rings clear as a song dropped straight from heaven, leaves little room in a listener's soul for the jangling discords of earth. Into that movement the great deaf musician seems to have flung the essence of his impatient spirit;—that rare mingling of ruggedness and simplicity, of purity and passionate power, which went to make up the remarkable character of the man, and which sets Beethoven's music apart from the music of his ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... terribly expensive sort, bringing an enormous box of chocolates with his best wishes; and there was the great German dramatic barytone, Herr Tiefenbach, who sang 'Amfortas' better than any one, and was a true musician as well as a man of culture, and he brought Margaret a book which he insisted that she must read on the voyage, called The Genesis of the Tone Epos; and there was that excellent and useful little artist, Fraeulein Ottilie Braun, who never had an enemy in her life, who was always ready to sing ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... was pounding iron from morning till night in a far away corner of Spain. One day an English youth, a friend of his, read him a page of Ruskin in his honor. "The plastic arts are essentially athletic." An invalid, a half paralyzed man, might be a great poet, a celebrated musician, but to be a Michael Angelo or a Titian a man must have not merely a privileged soul, but a vigorous body. Leonardo da Vinci broke a horseshoe in his hands; the sculptors of the Renaissance worked huge blocks of marble with their titanic arms ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... The musician who perhaps inspired a profounder enthusiasm during his lifetime than any other ever did had been missed among men but a few years, when a little book was quietly laid upon his shrine, and he received, as it were, an apotheosis. Half the world broke into acclaim over this outpouring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... but aspired To sit, and died in the aspiring: see, This mime—my son is he? And did I then Have one mad moment with a street musician? ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... became established in Rome again, he began to form new plans for developing his powers and capacities as a musician, in the hope of gaining still higher triumphs than those to which he had already attained. Far from giving his time and attention to the public business of the empire, he devoted himself with new zeal and enthusiasm to the cultivation of his art. In doing this it was necessary, according ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... The musician picked himself up with a fried sole embossed on the back of his dress coat and two portions of hot soup running down his neck, to say nothing of blobs of mashed potato and the contents of overturned cruets all ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... Glad to see you, Mr. Sherwood, oh, Shirley! It seems as though I had heard your name—aren't you an actor, or an artist? A musician, or something like that? My memory ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... observe Esther's frightened expression and nervous manner, but only answering good-naturedly: "Certainly she won't mind. Please use the piano whenever you like, for Betty hates practicing and I don't care much for a man musician, especially a poor one, though I ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... confused you," replied Prescott. "It's the musician of the guard—the bugler—who plays the march. It's a strain that is played, the first note beginning just as the reveille gun is fired, at the minute of six in the morning. Then, just five minutes later ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... up in performing an idea is likewise much the same as that taken up in performing a muscular motion. A musician can press the keys of an harpsichord with his fingers in the order of a tune he has been accustomed to play, in as little time as he can run over those notes in his mind. So we many times in an hour cover our eye-balls with our eye-lids without ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... From the land of the Ojibways, From the land of the Dacotahs, From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands, 15 Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, Feeds among the reeds and rushes. I repeat them as I heard them From the lips of Nawadaha, The musician, the sweet singer." 20 Should you ask where Nawadaha Found these songs so wild and wayward, Found these legends and traditions, I should answer, I should tell you, "In the bird's-nests of the forest, 25 In the ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... they would be ready to do in an instant what he would never do nor never dream of doing. He was not impulsive, he was not high-spirited, he was not chivalrous; yet he could play upon the impulses, the high spirits, and the chivalries of those whom he wished to destroy as dexterously as your trained musician can play upon the strings of a lute. Of course it is impossible not to admire such a cunning, however perverted the application of that cunning may be. For there is many a rascal in the broad world that has no wit to appreciate anything outside the ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... paintings that may pass as his in all Europe) there is but one example in the Uffizi, and that is unfinished. It is the Adoration of the Magi (1252), scarcely more than a shadow, begun in 1478. Leonardo was a wanderer all his life, an engineer, a musician, a sculptor, an architect, a mathematician, as well as a painter. This Adoration is the only work of his left in Tuscany, and there are but three other paintings from his hand in all Italy. Of these, the fresco of the Last Supper, at Milan, has been restored eight ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... history, you must see the proofs I have in my possession, for I shall have to relate one of the most remarkable stories you have ever heard. So strange indeed are the circumstances connected with that old Service that I have kept them to myself, lest people should think me an eccentric musician. Our late Dean knew part of them and witnessed some of the things I shall tell you. The story will take some little time, but if you will come across to my house you shall hear it and also see the proofs I ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... to-bucket," in a rapid, low, chanting song. Then the leading hound opened with a plaintive bay "how!-oo-oo-oo, how!-oo-oo-oo," and one by one the others joined in with varying notes till it swelled to a weird chorus of baying hounds which the banjo and the musician's voice made most realistic. Next the fox was spied and there were cries of "Hello! Ho! Here he is!" "There he runs," with the banjo thumping like mad! Then the medley shaded down into a wild, monotonous drumming from the strings and the voice, which represented most thrillingly the chase at ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... council, in which it is resolved to transport Ulysses into his country. After which splendid entertainments are made, where the celebrated musician and poet, Demodocus, plays and sings to the guests. They next proceed to the games, the race, the wrestling, discus, &c., where Ulysses casts a prodigious length, to the admiration of all the spectators. They return again to the banquet and Demodocus sings the loves ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... an object and analyzing it by concentrated attention, taking one part after another, one by one, until you have analyzed and mastered the whole object. Give it the same attention that the lover gives his loved one; the musician his favorite composition; the artist his favorite work of art; and the booklover his favorite book—when you have accomplished this, you have mastered concentration, and will be able to apply the mind "one pointed" upon anything you wish, physical or astral; ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... delightful absence of prejudice. The author finds much to praise in every school; he is neither impatient of old opera nor intolerant of new developments which have yet to prove their value; and he makes us feel that he is not only an enthusiastic lover of opera as a whole, but a cultivated musician. The historical plan adopted, in contradistinction to the arrangement by which the operas are grouped under their titles in alphabetical order, involves perhaps a little extra trouble to the casual reader; but by the aid of the index, any opera ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... "Well," replied the musician, seeing he was a simpleton, "it is a beautiful instrument, and I make so much money by it, that I cannot take anything ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... life is henceforward turned from its course, and from its tranquillity. Ah! how many of these ill-matched couples have I known, where the wife was sometimes executioner, sometimes victim, but more often executioner, and nearly always unwittingly so! The other evening I was at Dargenty's, the musician. There were but a few guests, and he was asked to play. Hardly had he begun one off those pretty mazurkas with a Polish rhythm, which make him the successor of Chopin, when his wife began to talk, quite low at first, then a little louder. By degrees the fire of conversation spread. At the ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... the work of a young musician, ambitious to seize his opportunity. After stating its theme largely, simply, in sixteen strong chords, it broke into variations in which the audience for a few moments might read nothing but cacophonous noise, until a ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... graceful reference to the deceased friend of his youth, E.F. Kauffmann: "If I were a philosophical emperor and wrote self-confessions, I would thank the gods for giving me, among other blessings, a poet and musician for an early friend. He is dead now, alas! the noble man whom alone I have to thank that my ear, though still unskillful, has been opened to the world of harmony. He was not a professional musician, but he had a thoroughly musical nature. The laws of composition he had studied theoretically, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... country-girl! If I were a poet, I'd write a song in your praise; and if I were a musician, I'd set it to music. But the poetry is in my heart; and 'tis set ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Mr W-r-n, who maintained that Michael Angelo was a greater musician than Queen Anne. He was here called to order, and reminded that Michael Angelo had nothing to do with the degeneracy of the Sixth. He begged leave ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... mother at the Queen's Hall and Albert Hall concerts. Ballad singing did not appeal to him in the same degree as operatic and orchestral music. Thanks to instinctive gifts and assiduous practice he became a scholarly and an accomplished musician. A brilliant pianist, his playing was marked by power and passion, and the colour and glow of an intense and sensitive personality. He could memorise the most intricate composition, and would play for hours without a note. Music was almost a religion with ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Two very important aids in eliciting exact discipline; for hoisting, warping, and heaving at the capstan in proper time; rated a second-class petty officer styled "musician," pay ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... ever would take a good suggestion from me, you might suggest to Mr. Sullivan, or some competent Musician, to adapt that Epilogue part of Tennyson's King ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... a small German town, situated on the river Erbach, called Deux Ponts, he saw my mother, fell desperately in love, and married. There was some excuse for him, for a more beautiful woman than my mother I never beheld; moreover, she was highly talented, and a most perfect musician; of a good family, and with a dower ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... much of her mother's charm with more than her mother's beauty. Her figure was commanding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She had grown up amidst the liberal culture of Henry's court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished scholar. Even among the highly-trained women who caught the impulse of the New Learning she stood in the extent of her acquirements without a peer. Ascham, who succeeded Grindal ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... a musician, you sing a song, or play it on the piano, that it may be etched upon your memory—and for the ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... the time of the Messiah will have eight strings; as it is written (Ps. xii. 1), "The chief musician upon ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... ever. Not content with your former exploit, when Ino leapt with Melicertes from the Scironian cliff, and you picked the boy up and conveyed him to the Isthmus, one of you swims from Methymna to Taenarum with this musician on his back, mantle and lyre and all. Those sailors had almost had their wicked will of him; but you were not going ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... It is a secret held only by the king and half a dozen scientists. The whole thing, however, is operated by two men in a room in the dome of the palace. The musician is a young German who was becoming the wonder of the musical world when father induced him to come to us. I have met him. He says he has been thoroughly happy here. He lives on music. He showed me the instrument he used to play, a little thing he called a violin, and its tones could not reach beyond ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... musician, so if I speak as a barbarian I must ask you and several gentlemen on the platform here to forgive me. From the lowest point of view a few drums and fifes in the battalion mean at least five extra miles in a route march, quite apart from ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... good musician and draws well. She would be glad indeed to get a class of pupils in the neighborhood to whom she might give lessons, here or at their own homes, in drawing and on the piano and harp. Lucinda thinks she could teach the English branches, the higher ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... would be thought of Egyptians who should neglect to fill the beaks of the callow fledglings? Yet this is precisely what France is doing. She does her utmost to produce artists by the artificial heat of competitive examination; but, the sculptor, painter, engraver, or musician once turned out by this mechanical process, she no more troubles herself about them and their fate than the dandy cares for yesterday's flower in his buttonhole. And so it happens that the really great man is a Greuze, a Watteau, a Felicien David, a Pagnesi, a Gericault, a Decamps, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... in the forest may be made into the violin music box of harmony, so my body, the material in the forest of matter, may be put in tune, become harmonious and be raised to perfection by the Master Musician, God—His mind within me. ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... of the means of study the place offered her; and as she was already a musician and a good linguist, she speedily went through the little course of study considered necessary for ladies in those days. Her music she practised incessantly; and one day, when the girls were out, and she remained at home, she was overheard to play a piece so well that Miss Minerva thought, ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... but one day Patrick undertook to bleed him for the blind staggers, and he must have cut the horse in the wrong place, for the poor brute fell over on the accordion person and died, nearly killing the musician." ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... the film ended. There were two parts, divided by an entr'acte. The notice on the programme stated that "a year had elapsed and that the Happy Princess was living in a pretty Norman cottage, all hung with creepers, together with her husband, a poor musician." ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he ventures to present—long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts, and a TEMPO of the gallop, and of the best, wantonest humour? Finally, who would venture on a German translation of Petronius, who, more than any great musician hitherto, was a master of PRESTO in invention, ideas, and words? What matter in the end about the swamps of the sick, evil world, or of the "ancient world," when like him, one has the feet of a wind, the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a wind, which makes everything ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the Tamburini put in. "Her father is a musician—and authentically marquis," she added, as though that ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... into it pile a superman, a great evolutionist, an artist, an ornithologist, a poet, a botanist, a photographer, a musician, an author, adorable youngsters of fifteen, and a tired business man, and within half an hour I shall have drawn from them superlatives of appreciation, each after his own method of emotional expression—whether a flood of exclamations, or silence. This is no light boast, for at ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... passage on the piano about a hundred times in succession, while Woloda, who was dozing on a settee in the drawing-room, kept addressing no one in particular as he muttered, "Lord! how she murders it! WHAT a musician! WHAT a Beethoven!" (he always pronounced the composer's name with especial irony). "Wrong again! Now—a second time! That's it!" and so on. Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table, and somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject—love. I was in the right frame of mind ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... University education and well grounded in Latin and Greek, and thoroughly acquainted with both English and French literature, for although born a Frenchman, he had been brought up in America. He was also a cultivated musician, and he and Mme. Jacot in the evenings would sing old French songs, Swiss songs, English songs, in their rich full voices; and then if you stole softly out on to the verandah, you would often find it crowded with a silent, black audience, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... have gone amongst them, and helped them in their battles, and they in turn have taught men great skill with herbs, and permitted some few to hear their tunes. Carolan slept upon a faery rath. Ever after their tunes ran in his head, and made him the great musician he was. In Scotland you have denounced them from the pulpit. In Ireland they have been permitted by the priests to consult them on the state of their souls. Unhappily the priests have decided that they have ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... that goodness keeps off enemies. What ignorance of life she crams into a dozen words. As for those poor countrymen of mine, they are just the people that carry back to Germany all the awful tales of my goings-on. Do you know, there was once a poor devil of a musician who had set my Zwei Grenadiere, and to whom I gave no end of help and advice, when he wanted to make an opera on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which I had treated in one of my books. Now he curses me and all the Jews together, and his ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... certain things communicate with certain other things. In the alphabet and the scale there are some letters and notes which combine with others, and some which do not; and the laws according to which they combine or are separated are known to the grammarian and musician. And there is a science which teaches not only what notes and letters, but what classes admit of combination with one another, and what not. This is a noble science, on which we have stumbled unawares; in seeking after the Sophist we have found the philosopher. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... CYNICAL OLD MUSICIAN. "Bah! NILSSON infuses religious sentiment into her singing, and these envious creatures don't know what religious sentiment is, so they think she is all wrong. If she had sung HANDEL with a smile, and a coquettish tossing of her head, they would still have ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... sensitive to the opinions of others, or aesthetically comparing their appearance and manners with an interior standard; while there are others who have received the gift, beyond the artist's eye or the musician's ear, of perfect self-forgetfulness. Their religion lacks the element of conflict, and comes to them ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... friend. So she did the wisest thing she could think of under the circumstances—made the girl go indoors to the piano and play to her. She knew that Rosanne gave, and was given to, by music in a way that is only possible to deep, inarticulate natures such as possess the musician's gift. One had only to listen to her music, thought Kitty, to know that there were depths in her that no woman would ever fathom, though a man might, some day. Denis Harlenden might—if she would ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... because many of us are beset by an idea that the shortest way to be loved is to be admired. It is a great misapprehension, because admiration breeds jealousy quite as often as it breeds affection—indeed oftener! But from the child that plays its little piece, or the itinerant musician that blows a flat cornet in the street, to the great dramatist or musician, the same desire to produce a favourable impression ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... age in which he lived. He was the miracle of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth; patient and persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker; the greatest mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time; architect, chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter—we are not only astounded by the variety of his natural gifts and acquired knowledge, but by the practical direction of his amazing powers. The extracts which have been published from MSS. now existing in his own handwriting show him to have anticipated ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... convulses the house with laughter; and if this situation had been so contrived,—as it might have been, allow me to say,—as to end the Act, the Curtain falling on the climax, the dashing down of the enraged musician's song and the exit of the Duke, the run of The Volcano would have been insured from now to Christmas. Is it too late to retrieve this? To quote the title of one of ANTHONY TROLLOPE's novels, "I say No!" There is so much that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... delicate, and the modelling of the parts not so well thought out. A good illustration of their work is the fragment of a square stele which represents a scene of offering or sacrifice. We see in the lower part of the picture a female singer, who is accompanied by a musician, playing on a lyre ornamented with the head of an ox, and a bull in the act of walking. In the upper part an individual advances, clad in a fringed mantle, and bearing in his right hand a kind of round ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... bagpipe in general, and have no objection to drums in particular—doubts do occasionally come across me whether there be in reality any such thing as tune. My friend William Ross was, on the contrary, a born musician. When a little boy, he had constructed for himself a fife and clarionet of young shoots of elder, on which he succeeded in discoursing sweet music; and addressing himself at another and later period to both the principles and ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... they walked, Nature brooded, sphynx-like. Their young and healthy natures were tuned in unison with the harmonies of the world like perfect instruments from which the delicate fingers of the great Musician evoked a melody of which she never tired, reserving her discords for a future day. On this delicious evening she permitted them to be thrilled through and through with joy and hope and she accompanied the song ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... sound, of so good a constitution, that hath not some impediment of body or mind. Quisque suos patimur manes, we have all our infirmities, first or last, more or less. There will be peradventure in an age, or one of a thousand, like Zenophilus the musician in [883]Pliny, that may happily live 105 years without any manner of impediment; a Pollio Romulus, that can preserve himself [884]"with wine and oil;" a man as fortunate as Q. Metellus, of whom Valerius so much brags; a man as healthy as Otto Herwardus, a senator of Augsburg in Germany, whom ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... doubt that Berta's piano has the marvellous quality of making its strings sound without the intervention of the human hand. And this being the case, it must be admitted that this marvellous instrument is, in addition, a consummate musician, for it plays with the skill attained only by ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... determined to find. To many there was uncanniness in the very extent of his knowledge, in his wide reading, in his mastery of more than one art, for, if he had not been an artist, he most assuredly would have been a musician or a writer. Added to all this, was the abnormal notice he attracted almost at once, the diligence with which he was imitated and parodied and the rapidity with which a Beardsley type ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... of Amherst, Wright of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hoffman and Wilkinson of Ann Arbor University, also won honors. Dr. Daniel Williams distinguished himself as a surgeon, Dunbar as a poet, Chestnut as a novelist, Tanner as an artist, and Coleridge Taylor as a musician. ...
— Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20 • William H. Ferris
... then the sweet musician sung, Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young: The jolly god in triumph comes; Sound the trumpets, beat the drums! Flushed with a purple grace He shows his honest face: Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes! Bacchus, ever ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... at his Quill's end. They may answer that these are fictitious Names: an excellent Answer indeed! As if those whom he attack'd were no better known; as if we were ignorant that Fabius was a Roman Knight who compos'd a Treatise of Law, that Tigellius was a Musician favour'd by Augustus, that Nasidienus Rufus was a famous Coxcomb in Rome, that Cassius Nomentanus was one of the most noted Rakes in Italy. Certainly those who talk in this manner, are not conversant with ancient Writers, nor extreamly ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... some old-fashioned skinkers and drawers, all with portentously red noses, were spreading a banquet on the leaf-strewn earth; while a horned and long-tailed gentleman (in whom I recognized the fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned his fiddle, and summoned the whole motley rout to a dance, before partaking of the festal cheer. So they joined hands in a circle, whirling round so swiftly, so madly, and ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... serve to illustrate the proper use of ain't, if it is ever proper to use such an inelegant word as that. "James ain't a good student," "Mary ain't a skillful musician," or "This orange ain't sweet," are expressions frequently heard, yet those who use them would be shocked to hear the same expressions with the proper equivalent am not or are not ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... Rome in the first third of the nineteenth century. A tolerable musician, and a police spy, "on the side." Ugly, small and a drunkard, he was nevertheless the lucky husband of Luigia, whose marvelous beauty was his continual boast. After an evening spent by him over the wine-cups, his wife in loathing lighted a brasier of charcoal, after carefully ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the woman, my friend could learn nothing further beyond the fact that, in her contract with the music-hall agent in Rotterdam, she had described herself as the daughter of an English musician, and had stated that both her parents were dead. She may have engaged herself without knowing the character of the hall, and the man, Charlie Martin, with his handsome face and pleasing sailor ways, and at least an Englishman, may have seemed to ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... his audience to the highest pitch of enthusiasm a string of his instrument broke, and a cicada or grasshopper perched on the bridge supplied by its voice the loss of the string and saved the fame of the musician. To this day in Surinam the Dutch call them lyre-players. If there is any truth in the story, the grasshopper then had powers far in advance of his degenerated descendants; for now the grasshopper—like the cricket—has a chirp consisting ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... a famous musician of the first half of the fourth century B.C. Others attribute the grievance to his pupil Ismenias. This story is also told ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... evening. The same remarks apply to musical people in general, whether in the shape of fiddlers, fluters, horn blowers, thumpers on the pianoforte, &c. These individuals can think of nothing else but their favourite pursuit, and imagine all the world to be equally interested in it. Take a musician off music, and he is the most ignorant of animals. A good story in illustration of this is told about Madame Catalani. Being at a large party in Vienna, where Goethe was present, she was much surprised at the great respect with which that illustrious man was treated. On inquiring his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... in many ways—great as an orator, musician, philosopher, politician, financier, and great and wise as a practical leader. Lovers of beauty are apt to be dreamers, but this man had the ability to plan, devise, lay out work and carry it through to a successful conclusion. He infused ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Plot," but he was returned to his charge, and held it until the accession of William and Mary. Pepys was a man of very wide interests. He was a member of parliament, and became president of the Royal Society. He was an accomplished musician and a keen critic of painting, architecture, and the drama. But it is as a connoisseur of human nature that Pepys is known to-day. The "Diary" extended over the ten years, January, 1659-60, to May, 1669; it closed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... sings a cheerful, gladsome song That shortens the way, however long. A screechy fife, a bass drum's beat Is wonderful music to marching feet; A scratchy fiddle or banjo's thump May tickle the toes till they want to jump. But one musician fills the air With discords that jar folks everywhere. A pity it is he ever was born— The discordant fellow who toots ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... be rid. When evening fell, he made his way to the Cafe Quadri in the Square of St. Mark, since this was supposed to be the chief haunt of the freethinkers and revolutionists. Here he was promptly recognized by an elderly musician who had at one time been conductor of the orchestra in the San Samueli Theatre, where Casanova had been a violinist thirty years before. By this old acquaintance, and without any advances on his own part, he was introduced ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... picture. It was a large subject—The bard Ossian playing his harp to Malvino. Ossian seated on the front of some brown rocks, Malvino seated before him, her hands folded across his knees, full of tender regard for the gentle musician. This work was her pastime and recreation. She selected the worsteds and worked her needle out and in, shading and coloring and outlining with the skill of an artist in paints. Three years she worked on this picture, almost to the end of the war, almost as long as Penelope ...
— The Little Immigrant • Eva Stern
... white cloth. Kneeling on the front of the large platform are four young men. The first one represents a sculptor. He kneels, facing the audience, and holds a mallet and chisel in his left hand. The second figure represents the mechanic, with his square and level. The third represents the musician, with his harp. The fourth personates the painter, with his pallet and brushes. Kneeling behind them, on the small platform, are three other figures. The first is the poet, with his roll of songs and pen; the second is the soldier, with his sword; and the third ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... neglected, and because it is so very elegant, charming, and lady-like an accomplishment. Where one person is really interested by music, twenty are pleased with good reading. Where one person is capable of becoming a skilful musician, twenty may become good readers. Where there is one occasion suitable for the exercise of musical talent, there are twenty for that of reading. The culture of the voice necessary for reading well, gives a delightful charm ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... evidently of excellent family, she was sufficiently assured of her position not to be sensitive about its recognition by others, and preferred to instil into her daughter's mind sound wholesome principles to useless and giddy accomplishments. And yet the daughter was accomplished, an excellent musician upon the piano and harp, and a vocalist of rare sweetness and perfection of execution, as well as mistress of other usual ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... taste for that art, of which, at a later period, he became the historian. He was apprenticed to a celebrated musician in London, and applied himself to study with vigour and success. He soon found a kind and munificent patron in Fulk Greville, a highborn and highbred man, who seems to have had in large measure all the accomplishments and all the follies, all the virtues and all the vices, which, a hundred ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
