Ornette Coleman Quotes

I try not to name too many labels - not because it's not cool, but because it starts getting political.

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

They don't know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two.

You cannot conceive the many without the one.

In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.

People try to contain things by putting them into categories. I don't.

Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one's perception of reality.

When we recognise that unity of all living things, then at once arises the question - how can we support this life of ours with least injury to the lives around us; how can we prevent our own life adding to the suffering of the world in which we live?

Child and serpent, star and stone — all one.

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.

The divisions of science are not like different lines that meet in one angle, but rather like the branches of trees that join in one trunk.

I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves-we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other's destiny.

You know what music is - a harmonic connection between all living beings.

The greatest, like Rembrandt, paint a gallant, a hag, and a carcass with equal passion and rapture; they love the truth as it is. They do not admit that anything can be ugly or evil; its existence justifies itself. This is because they know themselves to be part of an harmonious unity; to disdain any item of it would be to blaspheme the whole. The Thelemite is able to revel in any experience soever; in each he recognizes the tokens of ultimate Truth. It is surely obvious, even intellectually, that all phenomena are interdependent, and therefore involve each other.

In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.

Our body is simply a social structure made of many souls.

Reality has no inside, outside, or middle part.

I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I've never viewed them in any way as being separable.

We are interconnected.

The connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limit of his capacity. No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does.

There is not one world for man and one for animals, they are part of the same one and lead parallel lives.

He who regards all things as one is a companion of Nature.

We are like droplets of water in an ocean of consciousness; individual to an extent, but those droplets together make up the ocean -- without the droplets there is no ocean. It is the same with this infinite energy mind we call creation/god. We are not part of that infinity -- we are that infinity if we open ourselves up to reconnect with it. Wherever you stand in infinity, you are at the center of infinity. So everything that exists is everything that exists. I am everything that exists; and so are you -- the more you realize that, the more you open up to the full infinity of who you are.

You know harmony only exists in music-isn't that amazing? I think that if you see earth from very far away, the color is blue. That is very interesting because blue is the color of communication.