"Bach" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is God, and the love of beautiful things. I spent all day yesterday playing Bach's Passion Music, and the hours passed like a dream until my sisters came in from walking and began to talk about marriage and men. It made me feel sick—it was horrible; and it is such things that make me hate life—and I do hate it; it is the way we are brought back to earth, and ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... warm us. On the first of these expeditions, 1846-7, my little party, there being no officer but myself, surveyed seven hundred miles of coast of Arctic America by a sledge journey, which Parry, Ross, Bach, and Lyon had failed to accomplish, costing the country about L70,000 or L80,000 at the lowest computation. The total expense of my little party, including my own pay, was under fourteen hundred ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... fountainheads of this literature in the works of a few great masters who have set the pace and established the limits for all the rest. In the line of purely instrumental music this has been done by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. The latter, who exercised a vast influence upon the manner of developing a musical thought and in the selection of the orchestral colors in which it can be expressed advantageously, powerfully ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach. I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't contribute to the wealth of ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... distinguished it from every other work of a like nature. All one could say with certainty about it was that it was not modern music. There was a simplicity and a severity about it which stamped it unmistakably as belonging to an age anterior even to Bach or Handel: modern writers employ more ornamentation and are not so restricted in their harmonies; modern art sanctions a greater liberty, a less simplicity of method, and a less ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... one of Herne's company of players in Shore Acres, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Chopin, with a bad cough, a fastidious regard for beauty, and a flow of anaemic melody. He was divinely gifted with a greater richness of invention than was given to any other composers excepting two, Bach and Mozart; and death would not take his gifts as an excuse when he was thirty-seven. Hence our Mr. Cummings has droppings of lukewarm tears; hence, generally, compassion for his comparatively short life has ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... important place; but in spiritual things they will be no avail unless prosecuted by spiritual men. As well might men blind from birth attempt to study the starry heavens, and men born deaf undertake to expound and criticise the harmonies of Bach and Beethoven. Men must see and hear to speak and write intelligently on such subjects. And so men must be spiritually ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... good music—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—and were almost priggish in their contempt for anything of a lighter kind; especially with a lightness English or French! It was only the musical lightness of Germany they could endure at all! But ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... shouldered up on the foot-hills. Socrates is a great teacher, but look at Sphroniscus, the sculptor, his father. Paganini is a great musician, but Paganini was born of musicians whose wrists had muscles that stood out like whip-cords. Bach is a great musician, but there were forty people of the name of Bach mentioned in musical dictionaries. Charles Darwin is the great scientist, but there were four generations of scientists who had made ready for Darwin, just as there ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... thrill shot through him at the sound of the rich organ tones. They came from his father's wareroom. Evidently a master hand was there. Jonas sat up and listened. It was the portion of a prelude by Sebastian Bach, and the marvelous harmonies seemed to speak to Jonas as the voice of a spirit. He rose upon his feet, and his whole soul trembled with the wonderful words it spoke to him, though as yet he hardly understood their meaning. He went to the door and gently opened it. The back ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... what it can be compared? A fugue of Bach's. There was something fulminating but abundant, uninterruptedly abundant, and often so gentle; but there was this great difference, that he often groped for a word, changed it, altered it again, and yet it was incessant, and reverberant in spite of it all—that ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... it would be dead, bach? As I am a Christian woman thee'st got the beautifullest baby ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine |
