Constant Lambert famous quotes

The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm".
-- Constant Lambert

#Average #Enthusiasm #Gothic

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake.
-- Constant Lambert

#People #Lasts #Realizing

Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same.
-- Constant Lambert

#Party #Names #Leader

To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, to those who expect a sinister frisson from modern music, it is my melancholy duty to point out that all the bomb throwing and guillotining has already taken place.
-- Constant Lambert

#Taken #Bombs #Melancholy

Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.
-- Constant Lambert

#Pilots #Spirals #Descending

Music, from being an ordered succession of sounds, has become a matter of "sonorities", and anyone who can produce a brightly coloured brick of unusual shape is henceforth hailed as an architect.
-- Constant Lambert

#Sound #Shapes #Matter

The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.
-- Constant Lambert

#Song #Play #May

It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a faint period touch about Pacific 231 and Le Pas d'Acier. One feels...that Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and the Luddite riots; that Honegger should have been there to celebrate the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the death of Huskisson with a "Symphonie Triomphale et Funèbre".
-- Constant Lambert

#Fun #Spinning #Jenny

Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait.

the apathy and inattention of the average citizen is beyond comprehension.

Whereas the average individuals "often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are," self-actualizing individuals have "superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general."

What we call 'normal' in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don't even notice it ordinarily.

We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.

Maybe I'm delusional but I'm usually funny. It's not 100% but I have a pretty good batting average.

The average man. The emergence of the concept.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

It cannot take decades to resurrect, we must act immediately with purpose and enthusiasm to rebuild.

I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.