We live in the best of all possible worlds
Gottfried LeibnizRead
The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
Interpretation
Music is a form of unconscious arithmetic that provides pleasure through rhythm and structure.
In this quote, Leibniz suggests that music, while seemingly an emotional and creative pursuit, is fundamentally rooted in mathematical principles. The ability to derive pleasure from music lies in its underlying structures, which we comprehend without consciously counting or analyzing them. In essence, music's beauty stems from the intricate relationships and patterns that flow through it, often unnoticed by listeners.
In practice
In a presentation about the impact of music on emotions and psychology.
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.
Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.
An undevout poet is an impossibility.
There is no color line in art.
A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.
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