A Quote by Oliver Sacks

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. — © Oliver Sacks
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.
The arts reflect profoundly the most democratic credo, the belief in an individual vision or voice . . . The arts' belief in potential gives each of us -- both audience and creator -- pride in our society's ability to nurture individuals.
Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.
Most of the arts, as painting, sculpture, and music, have emotional appeal to the general public. This is because these arts can be experienced by some one or more of our senses. Such is not true of the art of mathematics; this art can be appreciated only by mathematicians, and to become a mathematician requires a long period of intensive training. The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose.
And this is the origin of pop music: it's a professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music as well.
Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine
I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.
Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it's much easier; but when you're standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it's a very, very intense kind of focus.
Though I love the arts with all my heart - paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music - and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.
I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.
I wanted to do music that was a little more sentimental, emotional, and serene - completely different from the party music I was doing.
Music is the most abstract of the arts and it expresses the sound of the universe itself. These are the real rhythms that stimulate the artist's mind and guide his hand.
The abstract has no emotional content... the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is.
The notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modern, uniquely American, uniquely destructive idea.
I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music.
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.
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