Bach Quotes

You wait a lifetime to meet someone who understands you, accepts you as you are. At the end, you find that someone, all along, has been you. ~ Richard Bach

The beginning [of a journey] is a terrible time to plan. It's the moment of greatest ignorance. In self-directed education, a lot of the value comes from exploiting opportunities that arise well out to sea, once I've seen some things and begun the learning process. ~ James Marcus Bach

We're different, we're the same. You thought you'd never find a word to say to a woman who didn't fly airplanes. I couldn't imagine myself spending time with a man who didn't love music. Could it be it's not as important to be alike as it is to be curious? Because we're different, we can have the fun of exchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each other. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that's only the beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we live. ~ Richard Bach

Quebec City is the most European of any city in North America; they speak French all the time. There is a part of town called Old Quebec which is really like being in France. The architecture is just gorgeous, food, shopping. I'd say Quebec City is the most beautiful city in North America I've seen. ~ Sebastian Bach

I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. 'What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?' she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.
I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. 'Why must I do what is hardest?'
'Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?
'But, Matron, I can't dream of playing Bach ... I couldn't read music.
'No, Marion,' she said her gaze soft ... 'No, not Bach's 'Gloria'. Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you. ~ Abraham Verghese

How many of us count fictional characters, or those we've never met, among our closest friends? My hand's up. ~ Richard Bach

Has it ever happened, you've seen a striking film, beautifully written and acted and photographed, that you walk out of the theater glad to be a human being and you say to yourself I hope they make a lot of money from that? I hope the actors, I hope the director earns a million dollars for what they've done, what they've given me tonight? And you go back and see the movie again and you're happy to be a tiny part of the system that is rewarding those people with every ticket ... the actors I see on the screen, they'll get twenty cents of this very dollar I'm paying now; they'll be able to buy an ice cream cone any flavor they want from their share of my ticket alone. Glorious moments in art in books and films and dance, they're delicious because we see ourselves in glory's mirror. ~ Richard Bach

That which most concerns and worries you - your survival - is the only certainty you have. ~ Richard Bach

Don't cry for me, for I go where music was born. ~ J. S. Bach

Family is not necessarily made of blood, but of those you meet along the way. ~ Richard Bach

For each of them, the most important thing in living was to reach out and touch perfection in that which they most loved to do ... ~ Richard Bach

Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace. ~ Yo-Yo Ma

It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart. ~ Karl Barth

Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest. ~ Jean Douchet

I'm convinced that Bach is the greatest genius who ever walked among us, and the Brandenburgs are what he wrote when he was happy. ~ Douglas Adams

I do not fear that "future generations will not read novels," etc. It is probably a complete misunderstanding to conceive of serious art in categories of production, market, readers, supply and demand( ... )art is not the fabrication of stories for readers but a spiritual cohabitation, something so tense and so separate from science, even contradictory to it, that there can be no competition between them. If someone fine, dignified, prolific, brilliant (this is how one ought to speak of artists this is the language art demands) is born in the future, if someone unique and unrepeatable is born, a Bach, a Rembrandt, then he will win people over, charm and seduce them ... ~ Witold Gombrowicz

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony. ~ Gyorgy Ligeti

Jazz isn't as profitable for labels like Hip hop or Rap. Jazz needs subsidies to continue, just like European classical works of Bach and Beethoven are subsidized. ~ Jimmy Heath

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed. ~ Richard Bach

You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way. ~ Richard Bach

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours. ~ Richard Bach

What matters is how I use what I know, every minute of every day; how I use it to remember, in the midst of the game. ~ Richard Bach

I'd like to get something together - like a Handel, Bach, Muddy waters, flamenco type of thing. If I could get that sound, I'd be happy ~ Jimi Hendrix

If you argue for your limitations they are yours ~ Richard Bach

The challenging thing is that we go home after doing the run-through and the writers stay there working, so sometimes I get script changes delivered to me at midnight. It's constantly shifting. ~ Jillian Bach

Idolatry is really not good for anyone. Not even the idols. ~ John Bach

The simplest things are often the truest. ~ Richard Bach

A lot of people when they try to sing Skid Row songs, they're screaming and yelling too much. It's more singing than screaming. ~ Sebastian Bach

Now that music is faithfully reproducible, musicians are not needed as once they were. And music itself has changed. Though small cadres of classicists keep the sacred and ineffable alive, they are under siege by coarse generations whose music is hardly as musical as a bus engine or a chain saw. Something must have occurred during their mothers' pregnancies. How else is it possible to explain that playing Bach keeps them away from public spaces the way iron spikes drive pigeons from cathedral ledges? ~ Mark Helprin

In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The world is a dream, you say, and it's lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky."
"No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference? ~ Richard Bach

We shouldn't confuse the pleasure of being articulate about wine, of being able to describe the distinctive features of a wine, with the non-verbal ability of remembering what they are like, or of appreciating them without being able to say why ~ Kent Bach

Henry's Understanding
He was reading late, at Richard's, down in Maine,
aged 32? Richard & Helen long in bed,
my good wife long in bed.
All I had to do was strip & get into my bed,
putting the marker in the book, & sleep,
& wake to a hot breakfast.
Off the coast was an island, P'tit Manaan,
the bluff from Richard's lawn was almost sheer.
A chill at four o'clock.
It only takes a few minutes to make a man.
A concentration upon now & here.
Suddenly, unlike Bach,
& horribly, unlike Bach, it occurred to me
that one night, instead of warm pajamas,
I'd take off all my clothes
& cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff
into the terrible water & walk forever
under it out toward the island. ~ John Berryman

variations on a
theme by christ:

your mouth
is an engine of genius.
it opens w/ snakeskins
of candy
/n bach.
your lip-balm pages
your crybaby bridges
/n the part of it that wants
goes to pieces
every time. ~ Brandon Thomas DiSabatino

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along. ~ Nigel Kennedy

Did anyone tell Toscanini, or Bach, that he had to choose between music and family, between art and a normal life? ~ Elisabeth Mann Borgese

On one of those rare occasions when Bach appraised his own life's work, he remarked: I worked hard. ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon ~ Gregory Corso

The war might be over, but scaring Terrans witless is one of life's little joys. ~ Rachel Bach

And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own. ~ Richard Bach

Why, Jon, why?" his mother asked. "Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don't you eat? Son, you're bone and feathers!" "I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want to know. ~ Richard Bach

The first prerequisite of an advanced being is a sense of humor. ~ Richard Bach

The world's crazy, when it comes to beauty. ~ Richard Bach

I prefer Offenbach to Bach often. ~ Thomas Beecham

I listen to music for emotion and I get zero emotion from rap. ~ Sebastian Bach

It's easier to interest a conservative audience in pushing the musical boundaries than to involve a young audience used to very noisy, assertive music in something like Schubert or Bach because the further back you go, the less bells and whistles there are. ~ Michael Tilson Thomas

All human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea. ~ Milan Kundera

The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins. ~ Hans Von Bulow

You choose, you live the consequences. Every yes, no, maybe, creates the school you call your personal experience. ~ Richard Bach

Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation. ~ Kate Grenville

I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of a bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past, I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. ~ James Baldwin

No, if it was up to me every record would be brand new studio material but Atlantic records asked me to put out a full live record because my tour really did do well last year. ~ Sebastian Bach

If you have a piece by Bach, he often develops the piece to such a high level that you can hardly do much more to it. But Saint-Luc wrote very simple baroque music, and so if you do not embellish it, it just falls apart. It's way too simple. ~ David Russell

You're a master when things go well, you're a victim when they go out of control. ~ Richard Bach

That's about when it happens. Coming down the escalator from one Nord floor to the next we see Little Teena has commandeered the grand piano. He's busy busting out Bach to all the bewildered shoppers. Little Teena just doesn't look for Nordstromy sitting there, with his red hair slick up in a pompadour, his girth squeezing out between his black leather jacket and the lip of his jeans, gumball machine rings decorating every single one of his fingers. But it's hen he goes from Bach to Great Balls of Fire that we attract the attention of the Nordfuck's militia. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Happiness is a choice. It is not always an easy one. ~ Richard Bach

No one believes in God any more, but everyone believes in Bach ~ Mauricio Kagel

There is something to astrology for those who believe in astrology, as there is something to medicine for those who believe in medicine. Every system works when we give our heart to it. ~ Richard Bach

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe. ~ Douglas Adams

You teach best that which you need most to learn. ~ Richard Bach

To begin with, you've got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself. ~ Richard Bach

I'm utterly convinced of the One-ness of Love and us as its perfect reflection. I am absolutely convinced that the world around us is a world of appearances and anyone who wants to can practice it. Change your thought and your environment will change. It's not instantaneous and sometimes we have to work very hard to make what we want happen. Working hard and holding that thought, it will change. ~ Richard Bach

There is no singing anymore, everything is yelling and shouting and rapping and that is real boring to a guy like me. ~ Sebastian Bach

My personal advice is to go to school first and get a liberal arts education, and then if you want to pursue acting, go to graduate school. ~ Jillian Bach

It cannot remain unmentioned that so many poorly equipped boys, and boys who have no talent at all for music, have been accepted into the school to date that the quality of music has necessarily declined and deteriorated. And those who do bring a few precepts with them when they come to school are not ready to be used immediately. ~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Shop for security over happiness and we buy it at that price. ~ Richard Bach

It must happen to us all ... We pack up what we've learned so far and leave the familiar behind. No fun, that shearing separation, but somewhere within, we must dimly know that saying goodbye to safety brings the only security we'll ever know. ~ Richard Bach

Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change. ~ Richard Bach

Gull Fletcher," they asked, "did the Magnificent Jonathan say, 'We are in truth the ideas of the Great Gull . . .' or was it, 'We are in fact the ideas of the Great Gull . . .'?" "Please. Call me Fletcher. Just Fletcher Seagull," he would reply, appalled that they would use a term of reverence upon him. "And what difference does it make, which word he used? Both are correct, we are ideas of the Great Gull . . ." But ~ Richard Bach

The only enlightened masters I know are the people that I see every day and the people that I've seen through my life who have had the understanding, at some level, that we're here to express love. ~ Richard Bach

Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development ... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad. ~ Lewis Thomas

I bring my classical training - some of it, but not all of it - and also my background and culture, to spirituals. And I try to leave room for that unpredictable factor, where the feeling of the song is allowed to come through. The same ethos can be applied to singing Mozart, or Schubert, or Bach. It's not just about what's on the page. ~ Kathleen Battle

We [people] have a teacher! The teacher is ourselves! We already know everything we need to know - our challenge is to discover that we know it. Turning to gurus, I think, we become guru-dependent, no different from drug-dependent, alcohol-dependent - needing an outside force to control our lives. ~ Richard Bach

Hate is love without enough data. ~ Richard Bach

I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can't listen to music while I write. It's too absorbing. ~ Cheryl Mendelson

We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks. ~ Richard Bach

The big thing about writing is three commands: Have fun. Don't think. Don't care. ~ Richard Bach

The overwhelming urge to kiss her comes over me again. It's like some kind of magnetic pull. I am able to control myself, but barely. I think this is what Paul meant that time in the car when he needed to stop making out because it was too intense. I feel like I need a time out to bury my head in a pillow and scream, but I doubt it'd do any good. ~ Mette Bach

Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like. ~ Haruki Murakami

I've been solo since 1996, so I've been doing it for a while now. ~ Sebastian Bach

Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them, ~ Richard Bach

I love dancing to the radio every morning, to start the day with such passion. Otherwise, life is too sad. My little daughter and I like dancing to classical music: Bach and Schubert. ~ Anna Mouglalis

Rejection hurts so much because we take it as a damning judgement passed not merely on our physical appeal but on our entire selves, and by extension (at this stage we're crying into our pillow, as something by Bach or Leonard Cohen plays on the stereo) on our very right to exist. 2. ~ Alain De Botton

Michelangelo is celebrated for the Sistine Chapel; in fact, he supervised a dozen unacknowledged assistants. Even one of the greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, chose to deflect credit for his compositions, writing at the bottom of each of his pieces "SDG," for Soli Deo Gloria - to God alone the glory. By ~ Twyla Tharp

Some who were not yet ready to venture into the chapel on Sundays might well put in their first appearance on a Saturday night to see what Y dyn bach ('the little man') had got to say. (The Welsh term has an element of affection in it not obvious in the English) ~ Iain H. Murray

There's so much to learn! And just when we think, "I've got it. I really understand what's going on," we're shown a whole new stage set on which to play. ~ Richard Bach

They – note the 'they' – paid Dr Stone to figure out what had destroyed the patient entering the ward. In each case a bullet had been fired at him, somewhere, at some time, in his life. The bullet entered him and the pain began to spread out. Insidiously, the pain filled him up until he split in half, right down the middle. The task of the staff, and even of the other patients, was to put the person back together but this could not be done so long as the bullet remained. All that lesser therapists did was note the person split into two pieces and begin the job of patching him back into a unity; but they failed to find and remove the bullet. The fatal bullet fired at the person was the basis of Freud's original attack on the psychologically injured person; Freud had understood: he called it a trauma. Later on, everyone got tired of searching for the fatal bullet; it took too long. Too much had to be learned about the patient. Dr Stone had a paranormal talent, like his paranormal Bach remedies which were a palpable hoax, a pretext to listen to the patient. Rum with a flower dipped in it – nothing more, but a sharp mind hearing what the patient said. ~ Philip K. Dick

I AM! YOU ARE! AND LOVE: IS ALL: THAT MATTERS! ~ Richard Bach

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea. ~ Richard Bach

The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered. ~ Lincoln Steffens

One of the great cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience. When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we've been wishing to lead ourselves. ~ Richard Bach

Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure. I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart. ~ Karl Barth

He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all ~ Richard Bach

Amazing. You were so attached to it, and it still disappeared for you."
"Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high ... "
"Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there is to it. ~ Richard Bach

Why had such a promising world been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by customs? ~ Richard Bach

If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice? ~ Richard Bach

Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice. ~ Richard Bach

No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are. ~ Richard Bach

What'll be your biography? "At that point, life seemed pretty bleak. Then (insert your name) did a surprising thing... ~ Richard Bach