Baroque Quotes

• Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Literature, Architecture, Baroque Music

  Ernest Hemingway (2002). “Death in the Afternoon”, p.153, Simon and Schuster

  88 Copy quote

  Show source

• I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Self, Style

  Jorge Luis Borges (2001). “A Universal History of Iniquity”, Penguin Books

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.

  Harry Seidler

  Views, Starting Over, Eras

  65 Copy quote

• A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.

  Juan Goytisolo

  Artist, Expression, Style

  33 Copy quote

• I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.

  Cecilia Bartoli

  Opera, Classic, Century

  60 Copy quote

• Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?

  Pierre Schaeffer

  Civilization, Sublime, Baroque Music

  27 Copy quote

• It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.

  Oswald Spengler

  Country, Land, Cities

  Oswald Spengler (1991). “The Decline of the West”, p.246, Oxford University Press, USA

  82 Copy quote

  Show source

• Classical, Romantic, and Baroque music, that's what I really like.

  Joan Armatrading

  Romantic, Romantic Love, Baroque Music

  24 Copy quote

• Baroque sculpture and interior design has a quality of creating an environment that seems organic because it's full of curves and details, like a forest.

  Camille Henrot

  Curves, Creating, Design

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Race, Government

  "What's Happening in America" (1966)

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Action, Emotion

  40 Copy quote

• I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony.

  Mahan Esfahani

  Block, Thinking, Cells

  "How To Annoy Your Dad: Play The Harpsichord". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. December 29, 2015.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was attracted by the curve — the liberated, sensual curve suggested by the possibilities of new technology yet so often recalled in venerable old baroque churches.

  Oscar Niemeyer

  Technology, Curves, Sensual

  Oscar Niemeyer (2000). “The curves of time: the memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer”, Phaidon Press

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Do whatever you please, follow your own star; be original if you want to be and don’t if you don’t want to be. Just be natural and gay and light-hearted and pretty and simple and overflowing and general and baroque and bare and austere and stylised and wild and daring and conservative, and learn and learn and learn. Open your mind to every form of beauty.

  Constance Spry

  Stars, Gay, Simple

  61 Copy quote

• The white race is the cancer of human history.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Race, White

  "What's Happening in America" (1966)

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I think about the reference to baroque, I'm most interested in how art was integrated into domestic life. That's why I like fresco, because fresco is part of the wall. It's art, but it's decoration at the same time.

  Camille Henrot

  Art, Wall, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My thesis statement would be—Bach didn't write Baroque music. He wrote great music.

  Chris Thile

  Writing, Would Be, Great Music

  7 Copy quote

• For my own singing, I used to be attracted by the baroque, the flashier the better, but now I prefer a simpler, purer style.

  Renee Fleming

  Style, Singing, Used

  4 Copy quote

• But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.

  J. M. Ledgard

  Moving, Thinking, Doors

  J M Ledgard (2011). “Submergence”, p.33, Random House

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music - one type of musician - to another, and to follow that thread in some kind of natural, evolutionary way.

  Jerry Lee Lewis

  Trying, Musician, Littles

  12 Copy quote

• I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.

  Elie Wiesel

  Writing, Musical, Needs

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

  Mark Haddon

  Prayer, Believe, Fall

  6 Copy quote

• I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.

  Neal Stephenson

  Running, Style, Trying

  Source: www.avclub.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

  Roland Barthes

  Dream, Men, Expression

  Roland Barthes (1997). “The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies”, p.6, Univ of California Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.'

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Expectations, Progress

  7 Copy quote