Can you imagine cheerful music? I cannot.

O Imagination, inexhaustible spring from which artists and scholars drink! Remain with us, though acknowledged and revered by few, to shield us from so-called enlightened folly.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

-- Plato

Is the motive good? Is there no selfish intent?

-- Kazuo Inamori

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

-- Born in Hungary in 1881, Bela Bartok

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

-- Born near Saint Petersburg in 1882, Igor Stravinsky later became a French and then American citizen, standing as one of the twentieth century's most important composers. His ballet The Rite of Spring provoked a near-riot at its 1913 Paris premiere and fundamentally changed how composers understood rhythm. Traversing three distinct creative periods, Russian, neoclassical, and serial, he drove the development of modernist music and

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

-- Born in Salzburg in 1756