We live in the best of all possible worlds
Gottfried LeibnizRead
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that music engages our minds in a way that involves counting and rhythm, yet we don't consciously recognize this process.
Gottfried Leibniz's quote highlights the intrinsic relationship between music and mathematics, emphasizing how music can evoke pleasure through rhythm and structure. It suggests that the enjoyment derived from music is often linked to an unconscious understanding of patterns and counting, which stimulates the mind, allowing for a deeper emotional and intellectual experience without explicit awareness.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of arts education, one might quote Leibniz to emphasize the cognitive benefits of music.
We live in the best of all possible worlds
I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.
It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.
..This is why the ultimate reason of things must lie in a necessary substance, in which the differentiation of the changes only exists eminently as in their source; and this is what we call God.
...a distinction must be made between true and false ideas, and that too much rein must not be given to a man's imagination under pretext of its being a clear and distinct intellection.
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
You have kids studying master class visual arts who are pushed to make films that will be successful economically; that's what they focus on. So they work for corporate interest instead of artistic expression.
The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.'
Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.
The great thing about performance capture is you can go off, and then, without changing costume, you can become another character.
I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That's never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad's 8-millimeter movie camera.
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