Bach Best Quotes

We teach best what we most need to learn.

A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we’re safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we’re two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we’ve found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.

The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, 'I've got responsibilities.

nobody means to get carried away in mediocrity, but it happens, it happens unless you think about everything you do, unless you make every choice the best one you know how to make.

You teach best what you most need to learn

Chase nuzzled the carpet with his cheek. “You’re my new best friend.

Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers.

Anybody who’s ever mattered, anybody who’s ever been happy, anybody who’s ever given any gift into the world has been a divinely selfish soul, living for his own best interest. No exceptions.

A computer program can modify itself but it cannot violate its own instructions — it can at best change some parts of itself by *obeying* its own instructions.

You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.

The    best way       to avoid responsibility is to say, “I’ve got    responsibilities.

Rory, are you okay?” Lena asked. “Yeah, you’ve been sighing a lot.” Chase was so concerned he even put down his fudge. “Do you have a crush on me too?” I stared at him incredulously, not sure I had heard him right, and Melodie said, “You are remarkably self-involved.” Chase looked insulted. “Adelaide sighed a lot right before she said she had a crush on me.” “She had to tell you?” Lena said, surprised. I snorted. “That’s totally it. It was the paint on your face. ‘My heart awakens in sight of your green skin/as clean and warty as a toad’s has ever been—’” I said in my best reciting voice, and we all laughed.

Jobs tended to be deeply moved by artists who displayed purity, and he became a fan. He invited Ma to play at his wedding, but he was out of the country on tour. He came by the Jobs house a few years later, sat in the living room, pulled out his 1733 Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. “This is what I would have played for your wedding,” he told them. Jobs teared up and told him, “You playing is the best argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don’t really believe a human alone can do this.” On

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home.

The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.

You    teach best       what you most need              to learn.

I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers. Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get muscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the most ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street—why Salomon Brothers is getting crunched now—because the ruthless people are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.

Historically, people have been naive about what qualities, if mechanized, would undeniably constitute intelligence. Is intelligence an ability to integrate functions symbolically? If so, then AI already exists, since symbolic integration routines outdo the best people in most cases. If intelligence involves learning, creativity, emotional responses, a sense of beauty, a sense of self, then there is a long road ahead, and it may be that these will only be realized when we have totally duplicated a living brain.

Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.

The best we can do is live our highest right, gracefully as we can, and let the Principle of Coincidence take it from there.    Seven

The best man is like water. Water is good, it benefits all things and does not compete with them. It dwells in lowly places that all disdain. This is why it is so near to Tao.

Words, I will argue, are the best example of memes, culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication—that is, by natural selection.

Courtney leans into Andrea, buries her face in Andrea’s shoulder. Andrea pats her daughter’s back. Courtney blubbers. Courtney sobs. Courtney wails. It is the best thing that has happened in months.

Perspective - Use It or Lose It. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that. Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them. Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, and teachers. Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a false messiah. Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully. The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change. Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts. Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect. Then be sure of one thing: The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have. The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't. A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, it feels an impulsion....this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reason and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons. You are never given a wish without being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages. Every person, all the events of your life, are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you. In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, "I've got responsibilities." The truth you speak has no past and no future. It is, and that's all it needs to be. Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't. Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends. The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution it not generally understood by less advanced lifeforms, and they'll call you crazy. Everything above may be wrong!

What my dad did was wrong, awful, inexcusable, but maybe there's still hope for him. Maybe if he can get the help he needs, they'll be able to resurrect the man who taught me about Bach's toccata and slept in the chair in my room when I was afraid of the dark. And if there's still hope for my dad, there has to still be hope for me. Mabe it's true that he and I have the same blag slug inside of us, but it's up to me to conquer it. I owe that to my dad. I owe that to myself. [....] I make a promise to myself: /I will be stronger than my sadness./ I will do my best to become the girl from Roman's drawing. The girl with the bright eyes. The girl with hope.

One way to get a life and keep it is to put energy into being an S&M (success and money) queen. I first heard this term in Karen Salmansohn’s fabulous book The 30-Day Plan to Whip Your Career Into Submission. Here’s how to do it: be a star at work. I don’t care if you flip burgers at McDonald’s or run a Fortune 500 company. Do everything with totality and excellence. Show up on time, all the time. Do what you say you will do. Contribute ideas. Take care of the people around you. Solve problems. Be an agent for change. Invest in being the best in your industry or the best in the world! If you’ve been thinking about changing professions, that’s even more reason to be a star at your current job. Operating with excellence now will get you back up to speed mentally and energetically so you can hit the ground running in your new position. It will also create good karma. When and if you finally do leave, your current employers will be happy to support you with a great reference and often leave an open door for additional work in the future. If you’re an entrepreneur, look at ways to enhance your business. Is there a new product or service you’ve wanted to offer? How can you create raving fans by making your customer service sparkle? How can you reach more people with your product or service? Can you impact thousands or even millions more? Let’s not forget the M in S&M. Getting a life and keeping it includes having strong financial health as well. This area is crucial because many women delay taking charge of their financial lives as they believe (or have been culturally conditioned to believe) that a man will come along and take care of it for them. This is a setup for disaster. You are an intelligent and capable woman. If you want to fully unleash your irresistibility, invest in your financial health now and don’t stop once you get involved in a relationship. If money management is a challenge for you, I highly recommend my favorite financial coach: David Bach. He is the bestselling author of many books, including The Automatic Millionaire, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Smart Couples Finish Rich. His advice is clear-cut and straightforward, and, most important, it works.

But my point applies to a broader audience. Indulge me in one more thought experiment, a familiar one: You will be stranded on a desert island, and you can take just 10 books and 10 music CDs. What do you choose? My prediction is that even people who don’t listen to classical music regularly will take Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Even people who haven’t picked up Shakespeare in years will take the collected works of Shakespeare. When we want something we can go back to again and again, we choose the same giants that the experts choose. My proposition about the literature, music, and visual arts of the last half century is that hardly any of it has enough substance to satisfy, over time. The post-1950 West has unquestionably produced some wonderful entertainments, and I do not mean wonderful slightingly. The Simpsons is wickedly smart, Saving Private Ryan is gripping, Groundhog Day is a brilliant moral fable. The West’s popular culture is for my money the only contemporary culture worth patronizing, with its best stories more compelling and revealing than the ones written by authors who purport to write serious novels, and its best popular music with more energy and charm than anything the academic composers turn out. It is a mixed bag, with the irredeemably vulgar side by side, sometimes intermingled, with the wittiest and most thoughtful work. But the quality is often first-rate—as well it might be. The people producing the best work include some who in another age could have been a Caravaggio or Brahms or Racine, and perhaps dozens of others good enough to have made their way onto the roster of significant figures. Why not be satisfied with wonderful entertainments?

Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life as cantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig. As the best musicians are not available, we must accept a man of moderate ability—had said a member of the Leipzig Municipal Council in hiring him.

a crucial part of my book's argument rests on the idea that meaning cannot be kept out of formal systems when sufficiently complex isomorphisms arise. Meaning comes in despite one's best efforts to keep symbols meaningless!

Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.

Will admittedly was at his best with Bach, where the beauty is in the music itself. He was worse with contemporary composers. Schoenberg made him want to stab someone.

As Bach would have most likely chosen a Moog synthesizer over the best organ of his time, I am fairly certain King David would have been a guitarist if he were living today. We use what we have in the time we live.

What do Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Picasso, Monet, Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Schubert, Brahms, and Dostoyevsky all have in common? They all produced far more than their contemporaries. Importantly, not every one of their creations was a masterpiece. Today, in fact, they are remembered for a mere fraction of their complete body of work. Creative geniuses simply do not generate masterpieces on a regular basis. Yet the quality that distinguishes them would be impossible without the quantity of attempts.

Music has no interior beacon that guarantees permanent meaning. Unlike truth, which is transcultural, absolute, and unchangeable, music can shift in meaning from place to place and time to time. Of all the art forms, music is inherently the most flexible. The music of Bach, as deeply fixed within the churchly contexts of his time and ours, can still shift meanings while remaining great music in its own right. For Lutherans it is church music, par excellence. For the young convert from Satanism, it was evil. In its original form, the tune “Austria” was the imperial national anthem, “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,” composed by Haydn. He then used it as the principal theme for the slow movement in his Emperor Quartet. In this guise it reflects the essentially secular contexts for which it was written and is perfectly at home in the concert hall. It is also the tune for “Deutschland über Alles,” the German national anthem. And for Jewish people, it is associated with the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust. And finally, it is the tune to which the hymn “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” is sung in virtually all American churches. To American Christians this tune’s primary meaning is “sacred.” To them, it carries virtually none of its first two meanings, unless one or the other was impressed first into their memories. There is no way to explain this phenomenon other than that music, as music, is completely relative.

Gould’s playing evoked a visceral response from people who had never thought to stop and really listen to classical music. There was something about the silence between and behind each note, the richness of the different voices, that captured the imagination and caused listeners to feel that their lives had been deepened and enhanced. Thousands of people over the years had heard Gould’s best-selling 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations—the little air and its thirty virtuosic variations—and became lifelong fans.

You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife, something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at Leon and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.

Their mother had white hands, long tapered fingers, and when she kneaded dough, her wedding ring clinked against the bowl. She was always singing softly as she played the piano with her white hands. She accompanied Emily's dance recitals and she could play anything, but Chopin was the one that Gillian loved. She played Chopin every night, and when she turned the pages, she wasn't really looking at the music. She knew the saddest Waltzes by heart. The saddest were the ones that she knew best, and she would play at bedtime, so falling asleep was like drifting off in autumn forests filled with golden leaves.

Mattheson was perhaps too clever for his own good; nonetheless the smart money was on this sophisticated and broadly educated polymath. Later on he wrote about music from the vantage point of practical experience, not only as an observer but also as a trained professional. He considered opera houses essential to civic pride, a necessity, like having efficient banks: ‘The latter provide for general security, the former for education and refreshment … where the best banks are, so too are the best opera houses,’ he maintained.

Something about the church being like Star Wars? I was trying to remember it today when I was talking to Father McKenzie, but I clean forgot.’ Buchan downed his drink, then placed the glass firmly on the table. There was nothing for him here, nothing good to come from sitting any longer. ‘They both look great,’ said Buchan. ‘The CGI on Star Wars, the colour palettes, the scope and the scale of the worlds they create, is extraordinary. Just like the Church looks great. So many wonderful buildings, so much jaw-dropping architecture and art. And the music too. Star Wars music, it’s epic. Some of the best, most iconic film music there is. And there’s tonnes, I mean, tonnes of great religious music, from, I don’t know, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen to Arvo Pärt’s Deer’s Cry, and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Everything in between. But then we get to the message, the dialogue, the script, the story... And they’re both shit.

Richard Bach: ‘You teach best what you most need to learn.’14

You teach best what you most need to learn.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett. How consciousness arises, and how much it depends on a sense of past, present, and future (plus a lot of other interesting insights).

Bach, he [Suvorin] said, was a person's best ally in the battle against despair, against the thought of how immeasurably great one's solitude is in the endlessness of the universe.

The best argument in favor of the universality of natural language expressive power is the possibility of translation. The best argument against universality is the impossibility of translation.

; I wrote this book for myself, as much as for anyone else, putting my faith in the words of the author Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.

Richard Bach echoed Jung’s sentiment when he said that if ever there were a manual written for “advanced souls” it would have to end with the following words: “Everything in this book may be wrong.” (Richard Bach, Messiah’s Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul) We can turn to people for advice and use the tools they have devised, but what will work best for our current situation is for us to discover. If we try a technique that others have used with great success and it does little to help us, we should not take this as a sign that we are incurable, it just means we need a different tool to escape from the chasm of our mind into which we have fallen. If we really desire to attain a level of mastery over our psyche we should experiment with techniques that work on all three of the main forms of human experience: our behaviours, our thoughts, and our emotions.

A hi-fi machine was blaring Bach’s Toccata in F major.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett.

I offer you my best as we explore the edges of an incredibly fascinating and important frontier, even though a voice within me would prefer simply to play music for you instead—perhaps Chopin Nocturnes with their many subtle nuances of emotional expression, or the profoundly powerful yet joyful and playful Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, “I’ve got responsibilities.

As a young revolutionary, this was a painful lesson for me: if you wanted to survive in this country, you’d best not be honest.

Perhaps someday, a look-ahead program with enough brute force will indeed overcome the best human players-but that will be a small intellectual gain, compared to the revelation that intelligence depends crucially on the ability to create high-level descriptions of complex arrays, such as chess boards, television screens, printed pages, or paintings.

What my dad did was wrong, awful, inexcusable, but maybe there's still hope for him. Maybe if he can get the help he needs, they'll be able to resurrect the man who taught me about Bach's toccata and slept in the chair in my room when I was afraid of the dark. And if there's still hope for my dad, there has to still be hope for me. Mabe it's true that he and I have the same black slug inside of us, but it's up to me to conquer it. I owe that to my dad. I owe that to myself. [....] I make a promise to myself: /I will be stronger than my sadness./ I will do my best to become the girl from Roman's drawing. The girl with the bright eyes. The girl with hope.

You teach best what you most need to learn. —RICHARD BACH, ILLUSIONS: THE ADVENTURES OF A RELUCTANT MESSIAH