Music is a therapy.It is a communication far more powerful than words, far more immediate, far more efficient.
If I wanted to play the violin, I had to work. Because anything that one wants to do really, and one loves doing, one must do everyday. It should be as easy to the artist and as natural as flying is to a bird. And you can’t imagine a bird saying well, I’m tired today, I’m not going to fly!
Music lives and breathes to tell us who we are and what we face. It is a path between ourselves and the infinite.
Peace may sound simple – one beautiful word – but it requires everything we have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.
Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
The ultimate aim in life should be to fulfill to the utmost all that within our ability and to share that which is good and beautiful.
Each human being has the eternal duty of turning what is hard and brutal into
a tender and subtle offering, what is crude into an object of refinement, what
is ugly into a thing of beauty, confrontation into collaboration, ignorance into
knowledge, hereby rediscovering the child’s dream of a creative reality
incessantly renewed by death, the servant of life, and by life the servant of love
The practice of yoga induces a primary sense of measure and proportion. Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony.
To play great music, you must keep your eyes on a distant star.
I can only think of music as something inherent in every human being – a birthright. Music coordinates mind, body and spirit.
Improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul.
The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency—half tiger,half poet.
A society without its dreamers can never be free.
To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal. You require absolute control and professionalism.
Life is not a finished product, it is only what we make of it, and if we make nothing of it, someone else will, and we will be his slave.
Why is compassion not part of our established curriculum, an inherent part of our education? Compassion, awe, wonder, curiosity, exaltation, humility – these are the very foundation of any real civilization, no longer the prerogatives, the preserves of any one church, but belonging to everyone, every child in every home, in every school.
We are full of rhythms . . . our pulse, our gestures, our digestive tracts, the lunar and seasonal cycles.
In all teaching there must be a fusion of authority as an adult providing a stable framework for the children in one’s care, and humility as another human being ready to educate an equal who may turn out to be a superior.
It is music that welds spiritual and sensual, that can convey ecstasy free of guilt, faith without dogma, love as homage, and a person at home with nature and the infinite.
We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It’s the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.
A dream is unrehearsed.
We embark unhesitatingly on the path, in a direction that is absolutely right and urgent, supported by everyone, in the knowledge that this path is but a learning process… We have to keep on learning, creating, applying, by-passing, touching upon, refining and clarifying a number of notions and details that need to be improvised and applied and which, thank God, we cannot foresee. The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing.
Do we not find freedom along the guiding lines of discipline?
In reality, infinity is merely the distance to the heart of a stranger. Eternity is the moment of cognition.
Everyone should in some way be creative, irrespective of the quality of that which he creates.
