Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
Each human being has the eternal duty of turning what is hard and brutal into_x000D_ a tender and subtle offering, what is crude into an object of refinement, what_x000D_ is ugly into a thing of beauty, confrontation into collaboration, ignorance into_x000D_ knowledge, hereby rediscovering the child's dream of a creative reality_x000D_ incessantly renewed by death, the servant of life, and by life the servant of love
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of human creativity and love in overcoming life's challenges.
Yehudi Menuhin's quote reflects the profound human responsibility to transform the harsh realities of life into something beautiful and enriching. It suggests that through creativity, collaboration, and love, we can turn adversity into opportunity and ignorance into wisdom, ultimately allowing us to reconnect with the innocence and dreams of our childhood. The idea that both life and death serve as catalysts for this transformation encapsulates the cyclical nature of existence, where every ending paves the way for new beginnings.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, you can use this quote to inspire listeners to find beauty in their struggles.
More from Yehudi Menuhin
All quotes →Music lives and breathes to tell us who we are and what we face. It is a path between ourselves and the infinite.
The practice of yoga induces a primary sense of measure and proportion. Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony.
Improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul.
We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.
It is music that welds spiritual and sensual, that can convey ecstasy free of guilt, faith without dogma, love as homage, and a person at home with nature and the infinite.
Similar quotes
Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.
To be spiritually dead is to be diabolically alive
Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Since I am convinced that I wrong no one, I am not likely to wrong myself.
Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.