Joseph Addison Quotes

The world has kissed my Soul with its pain, asking for its return in Songs.

It is a bird-flight of the soul, when the heart declares itself in song. The affections that clothe themselves with wings are passions that have been subdued to virtues.

John could write a mean song. He had a lot of venom in him. Whereas I had a happy childhood.

I think, there are a couple of songs. I'm really proud of How far I'll Go. I literally locked myself up in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house to write those lyrics. I wanted to get to my angstiest possible place. So I went method on that.

The first thing about a song is that it has to be real, be lived; it has to be emotional, and melancholic. I don't mean sad. Melancholy is sort of a comfort. Melancholy has a sort of beauty to it. This attracts me to every other form of art.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.

Life songs of ages, throbbing in my blood, have danced the rhythm of the tide and flood.

The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.

The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.

Humanity needs more than merely information. We express original ideas, humor, and our personal wills. We express passions and emotions. A person's point of view conveys all of these aspects of identity.

Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality.

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

Colours in vibration, peeling like silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death.

Then I played the song that hides in the center of me. That wordless music that moves through the secret places in my heart. I played it carefully, strumming it slow and low into the dark stillness of the night. I would like to say it is a happy song, that it is sweet and bright, but it is not.

There's definitely some pieces in there that reflect on my personal life, but really, they aren't as personal as everybody thinks they are. I would like them to be more personal. The emotions, the songs themselves are personal. I can't do it - I've tried to write personally and it just doesn't seem to work. It would be too obvious. Some things that you could read in could fit into anyone's life that had any amount of pain at all. It's pretty cliche'.

I have no words alas! to tell the loveliness of loving well

I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff. People think that Plastic Ono is very personal, but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I still search for other ways of expressing myself. Song writing is a limiting experience in some ways - writing down words that have to rhyme.

As oil will find its way into crevices where water cannot penetrate, so song will find its way where speech can no longer enter.

In fact, my favorite Beatles song is "In My Life." And from that, you can gauge that my friends mean so much to me. I love John Lennon, so it's kind of like moody... There's a lot you can gauge from that. As insignificant as it seems, as an actor, it's an interesting way to approach a character.

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

But, as an actress, you don't want to run into these scenes, willy-nilly. The couple that I did do were important for the character and essential to the plot, to show what was actually going on between each character. It is great to be able to have that, and to be able to say certain things and have certain passions.

The thing that bothers me is that it seems like all the sensitive stuff I write just goes unnoticed . . . the media doesn't get who I am at all. Or maybe they just can't accept it. It doesn't fit into those negative stories they like to write. I'm the kind of guy who is moved by a song like Don McLean's "Vincent," that one about Van Gogh. The lyric on that song is so touching. That's how I want to make my songs feel. Take "Dear Mama" - I aimed that one straight for my homies' heartstrings.