Virtuosity Quotes

• In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

  John Barth

  Art, Skills, Doe

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• Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a 'genius'.

  Carl von Clausewitz

  Achievement, Degrees, Genius

  Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard, Peter Paret (1989). “On War”, p.100, Princeton University Press

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• As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Self Confidence, Brilliant, Complicated

  "Adventures of a Mathematician". Book by Stanislaw Ulam, 3rd edition. Chapter 4: "Princeton Days", p. 76, 1991.

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• Classical virtuosity is more than technique, line, proportion, and balance. It is as if the performer and spectator come together to hold in their hands a bird with a broken wing. The creature can be felt to stir, to struggle for freedom. Its life responds to human warmth; its wing might brush your check as it flies away.

  Gelsey Kirkland

  Dance, Struggle, Hands

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• I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mean, Thinking, Practice

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• There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.

  Robert Hughes

  Greatness, Ineptitude, Today

  Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.107, Vintage

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• Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Art, Leaving, Identity

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “My Name Is Red”, p.22, Faber & Faber

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• The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idiosyncratic and personal that to imitate them would be like filling somebody else's bottle with your wine.

  David Finckel

  Wine, Would Be, Bottles

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. July 11, 2012.

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• Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

  Rita Dove

  Rap, Play, Pleasure

  Interview with Jesse Kornbluth for "The Book Report", www.math.buffalo.edu. April 8, 1997.

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• I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.

  Adolf Hitler

  Christian, Religious, Art

  Adolf Hitler (1998). “Mein Kampf”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition

  Robert C. Solomon

  Perfection, Kitsch, Execution

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• I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that its extremely predictable, its a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and theres a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.

  Ken Burns

  Thinking, Rocks, Play

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• I do feel pretty lucky that I'm not so great at playing and singing, it forces me to make sure I've really got something worth presenting because I can't rely on any kind of virtuosity to dazzle people with.

  Jeffrey Lewis

  People, Singing, Lucky

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think I can define my entire life, virtuosity and business philosophy down to the core fundamental that I absolutely hate being told what to do. But like any artist or any human being out there, I desperately want to be loved, and I spend my entire life trying to balance those two facts.

  Amanda Palmer

  Hate, Philosophy, Artist

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• The ability to suffer is a small matter - weak women and even slaves can acheive virtuosity in that.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Pain, Suffering, Hardship

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• For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my career. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record it truthfully. Look at the reporters and at the amateur photographer! They both have only one goal; to record a memory or a document. And that is pure photography.

  Andre Kertesz

  Photography, Memories, Careers

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• As far as technique and virtuosity are concerned, I think I am better than Bilozerchev.

  Li Ning

  Gymnastics, Thinking, Technique

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• I didn't want it to have any technical virtuosity; I wanted it to just be really clear how it was made. For my work in general, it's always really clear how it is made.

  Josh Smith

  Want, Made, Clear

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Paul's One Way Out is a fresh, intelligently arranged, and satisfyingly complete telling of the lengthy (and unlikely) history of the group that almost singlehandedly brought rock up to a level of jazz-like sophistication and virtuosity, introducing it as a medium worthy of the soloist's art. Oral histories can be tricky things: either penetrating, delivering information and backstories that get to the heart of how timeless music was made. Or too often, they lie flat on the page, a random retelling of repeated facts and reheated yarns. I'm happy to say that Paul's is in that first category.

  Ashley Kahn

  Art, Lying, Rocks

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• My goal is to make fine art, and fine art comes from the soul. If you have virtuosity and facility, you can take and create something of significance.

  Richard MacDonald

  Art, Goal, Soul

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• No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.

  Yvonne Rainer

  Stars, Believe, Moving

  Yvonne Rainer (1999). “A Woman Who--: Essays, Interviews, Scripts”, p.16, JHU Press

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• I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has

  Thom Gunn

  Two, Feelings, Technique

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• Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence.

  George Saunders

  Growing Up, Writing, Intelligent

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• Whether a listener absorbs this music or rebels against it is at least partly a matter of how the performers put it across. It would be hard to imagine an ensemble playing it with greater virtuosity than the JACK Quartet, which seemed not merely earnest but also completely comfortable with, and passionate about, the strange sound worlds at hand.

  Allan Kozinn

  Hands, Sound, Rebel

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• We weren't straight-A students. We didn't start playing until we were teenagers, and we started playing rock and roll and punk rock - power chords - before we ever thought we would play folk music. So virtuosity was just never in my reach.

  Ketch Secor

  Teenager, Rocks, Rock And Roll

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