Top 47 Virtuosity Quotes & Sayings

Imagine a singer with the virtuosity of Joan Sutherland or Ella Fitzgerald, the public persona of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the audience of Elvis, and you have Umm Kulthum.

I do feel pretty lucky that I'm not so great at playing and singing, it forces me to make sure I've really got something worth presenting because I can't rely on any kind of virtuosity to dazzle people with.

The irony of multitasking is that it's exhausting: when you're doing two or three things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. You're also cheating yourself because your're not doing anything excellently. You're compromising your virtuosity. In the words of T. S. Elliot, you're 'distracted from distractions by distractions'.

No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.

President Obama is a gifted politician. He is gifted with rhetoric virtuosity. He is gifted with the ability to lie directly to camera without blinking. And he is gifted with some of the most incompetent conservative opposition in the history of the country.

I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that its extremely predictable, its a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and theres a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.

With the arrival of the new comes the need to overcome fascination with novelty in order to approach substance and sophistication - a sophistication born of subtlety and depth of perception, not complexity and perceived virtuosity.

We weren't straight-A students. We didn't start playing until we were teenagers, and we started playing rock and roll and punk rock - power chords - before we ever thought we would play folk music. So virtuosity was just never in my reach.

Music is such a great communicator. It breaks down linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, it basically reaches out. That's when rock n' roll succeeds, and that's what virtuosity is all about.

Whether a listener absorbs this music or rebels against it is at least partly a matter of how the performers put it across. It would be hard to imagine an ensemble playing it with greater virtuosity than the JACK Quartet, which seemed not merely earnest but also completely comfortable with, and passionate about, the strange sound worlds at hand.

As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of peole who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand when in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A.J. Ayer.

Artists forget than the first purpose of a comic character is to convey emotion. Everything else, like realism, or other kinds of virtuosity, is an optional extra. If you sacrifice expression for the sake of other concerns, you're putting the cart before the horse.

I think I can define my entire life, virtuosity and business philosophy down to the core fundamental that I absolutely hate being told what to do. But like any artist or any human being out there, I desperately want to be loved, and I spend my entire life trying to balance those two facts.

There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

Classical virtuosity is more than technique, line, proportion, and balance. It is as if the performer and spectator come together to hold in their hands a bird with a broken wing. The creature can be felt to stir, to struggle for freedom. Its life responds to human warmth; its wing might brush your check as it flies away.

I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.

From the ashes of Bauhaus, Love and Rockets transformed its grandiosity and excesses into boldness and virtuosity. Plus, it wasn't afraid of a catchy hook or two.

Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible.

I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.

My goal is to make fine art, and fine art comes from the soul. If you have virtuosity and facility, you can take and create something of significance.

To will nothing, then, is ..looking ..for that infinite virtuosity that always enters into the game and always runs off

For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my career. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record it truthfully. Look at the reporters and at the amateur photographer! They both have only one goal; to record a memory or a document. And that is pure photography.

I always admired very much the virtuosity in Strauss because, really, he's a master of using the orchestra. And I like virtuosity, I must say, even if the taste of the music is not always mine.

I love the virtuosity and imaginative chutzpah of 'Da Vinci's Demons,' and not just because my boyfriend is in it!

I've always been obsessed with the grain of the human voice. It's the ultimate instrument, there's this whole level of virtuosity and poetry, a sort of athleticism, of controlling your voice.

Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition

I didn't want it to have any technical virtuosity; I wanted it to just be really clear how it was made. For my work in general, it's always really clear how it is made.

I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.

Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a 'genius'.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

Paul's One Way Out is a fresh, intelligently arranged, and satisfyingly complete telling of the lengthy (and unlikely) history of the group that almost singlehandedly brought rock up to a level of jazz-like sophistication and virtuosity, introducing it as a medium worthy of the soloist's art. Oral histories can be tricky things: either penetrating, delivering information and backstories that get to the heart of how timeless music was made. Or too often, they lie flat on the page, a random retelling of repeated facts and reheated yarns. I'm happy to say that Paul's is in that first category.

Punk rock has never really had much patience with musical virtuosity. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say that for most of its history, punk has been actively hostile to virtuosity.

Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence.

The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idiosyncratic and personal that to imitate them would be like filling somebody else's bottle with your wine.

When my brother and me got into performing in the late '40s and early '50s, it was a sensational opportunity to learn from our elders. Every show we played had a dancer, a comic, a juggler, a singer, an acrobat. I came to appreciate virtuosity in all forms of the business.

In fact, on one occasion, a rather pedantic experimental psychologist was telling him about a long, complicated experiment he had done, incorporating all the proper controls and using considerable technical virtuosity. When he saw Crick's exasperated expression he said, "but Dr. Crick, we have got it right - we know it's right," Crick's response was, "The point is not whether it's right. The point is: does it even matter whether its right or wrong?"

As far as technique and virtuosity are concerned, I think I am better than Bilozerchev.

In 'Training Day,' Mr. Washington's dry-ice grandeur - the predator's reflexes contrasting with a pensive mouth - deserves regard, and his powerhouse virtuosity will almost guarantee him an Oscar nomination.

The ability to suffer is a small matter - weak women and even slaves can acheive virtuosity in that.

And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in ... tiresome acrobatics. ... Flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step. ... When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit.

There are very few things of virtuosity or genius that you can actually witness.

I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has

You never find virtuosity for its own sake.

The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one.