Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

The laws of morals and the laws of music are the same.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat. I go with the rhythm of it and the words start to come to my mind and those words could be based on things that's been on my mind for the past year, the past month, the past week, whatever; I write it.

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

I read a lot of poetry, and I love what it does with language. I love music, too, and I think there's probably no coincidence there, that the rhythm of the words is almost as important as the words themselves, and when you can get the two working together, which usually takes me about 20 goes, I feel a huge satisfaction.

Music is closer to poetry than anything.

Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.

Music is a science, in many ways it's mathematical.

Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music.

Thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers.

Dante Alighieri was not only a Christian poet or a priest, he was a man. He was a real poet. We can understand that the goal of Divine Comedy is beauty. You don't need also to understand Italian or to know Italian, because when Dante's writing, when we recite Dante out loud, it explodes a cosmos of illumination like to recite music, a symphony.

Mathematics is the language of size.

Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.

I have heard what poets write about women. They rhyme and rhapsodize and lie. I have watched sailors on the shore stare mutely at the slow-rolling swell of the sea. I have watched old soldiers with hearts like leather grow teary-eyed at their king's colors stretched against the wind. Listen to me: these men know nothing of love. You will not find it in the words of poets or the longing eyes of sailors. If you want to know of love, look to a trouper's hands as he makes his music. A trouper knows.