Wynton Marsalis Quotes

Terrible and sublime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion!

Actors want to surprise themselves. When it's really good, you kind of transcend yourself, and that happens infrequently. Very, very rarely.

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

When you're in the game, you're still in the moment.

A lot of marathon runners access flow state. That's why it's so addictive: because they just get into this state where they're just completely one - they are in complete oneness. That's what happens to me when I play music and, I suppose, a lot of other people, too, which is why we do it.

You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.

You are truly focused when you're so focused that you don't know you're focused.

But what I didn't recognize when I was much younger was this sort of...when you're on, when you're really on, go at it.

Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy - but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.

I loved you so much right then Sam Roth.

Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

Lose yourself in the music, the moment - you own it.

There are moments when you act that you actually disappear from your body, and that's amazing. That's better than any drug, I would imagine. People take drugs to disappear from themself, and that's what it feels like when you hit that moment.

She walked in the shadow of Rango with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of flow.

People talk about universal intelligence ... I'm reticent to believe almost anything, just because my parents weren't religious at all, but that's when I feel it. People talk about being in the "flow."

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.

The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

I'm totally within the music. I'M LOST.

It’s the same thing. Passion is passion. It’s the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn’t matter where it’s directed.

You become so intense that you are not there, because if you are there then the intensity cannot be total; then two are there. If you love and the lover is there, then love cannot be intense. Love so deeply, so totally, that the lover disappears. Then you are just an energy moving. Then you will know love, you will know life, you will know death.

Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present.

It's easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.

I get so into playing the bass. The only time I ever feel the same way is when I'm having sex; it's the epitome of unifying with something.

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.