It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities.

Musical practice is too young an art in America to warrant a search for men with a conductor's gift.

It always makes me sad when I think of how I saw Wagner wasting his vitality, not only by singing their parts to some of his artists, but acting out the smallest details, and of how few they were who were responsive to his wishes.

Conducting! A subject, truly, concerning which much might be written, yet scarcely anything of real importance is to be found in books.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

Composers are not all good conductors.

The ability to conduct is a gift of God with which few have been endowed in full measure.

I have often heard the statement made by foreign singers, as a demonstrated fact, that the German artists are artists in feeling indeed, and serious in their devotion, but that their singing is crude.

Of course, experience strengthens one later.

It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities.

The conductor's gift does not always go hand in hand with that of composition; indeed, the union is found much more seldom than is popularly believed.

I learned, too, how it was possible with the help of the picture and action to transform an apparently insignificant violin passage into an incident, and to lift a simple horn call into a thing of stupendous significance by means of scenic emphasis.

America does not need gorgeous halls and concert rooms for its musical development, but music schools with competent teachers, and many, very many, free scholarships for talented young disciples who are unable to pay the expense of study.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.

The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.

On the other hand, all kinds of adventurous schemes to add security checkpoints to subway and bus systems have been circulating since the London attacks. This is nonsense. No one can guaranty 100 percent security.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

They are few in the midst of an overwhelming mass of brute force, and their submission is wisdom; but for a nation like England to submit to be robbed by any invader who chooses to visit her shores seemed to me to be nonsense.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

If you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

There's a feeling that strength is determined by the size of a union. That clearly is nonsense.

Movies are movies, and I don't think any of them are going to hurt the moral fiber of America and all that nonsense.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

I wrote the tunes and sang only nonsense words. Then came Moore and dressed them with the lyrics.

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!

Always remember, money isn't everything - but also remember to make a lot of it before talking such fool nonsense.