Karen Armstrong Quotes

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.

In some ways I believe music is the more convincing communicator of ideas than words. For instance, we can hear of Kordaly and Bartok and recognise them as Hungarian, but very few of us speak Hungarian, but the music itself speaks to more people.

I express my thoughts through my music.

You don't have to say something directly to affect someone. You can make a piece of music without words that can capture a feeling of tragedy or struggle or anger or triumph. It's the translation of the human experience into another form.

Music is all about creativity.

Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.

Music is how you feel. But if I can say one word, I'll say 'necessary.' I felt it was necessary.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Music bypasses the conceptual mind. Music does not give you food for thought.

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

the one universal form of art is music.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

There is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.

The guitar is a means of expressing music, When you get into the emotional side of it, then it's not the guitar that matters so much as the music itself. But the guitar is the vehicle I use. It's how I express myself. As for the emotional side, music takes up where language leaves off. To try and verbalize what music says, emotionally and spiritually, is futile. Let me put it this way, Louis Armstrong once said if you've got to ask, you'll never know.

We are able to feel and learn very quickly through music, through art, through poetry some spiritual things that we would otherwise learn very slowly.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

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

For me, singing was real life, not two plus two equals four.

Even though Prince wasn't rapping and it was a whole different era, it shows how artists expressed themselves without saying too much, and that was the real beauty of the art.

Music stands in a much closer connection with pure sensation than any of the other arts.

Creative Arts raise a person to another level of consciousness as if you could imagine life before words.

Beethoven was so hard of hearing, he thought he was a painter.

Music is the expression of the will of nature while all other arts are expressions of the idea of nature.