Practice without theory - Da Vinci

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. 

– Leonardo da Vinci

Long for the sea...

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." 

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Wading the River

A man on foot, with his clothes in a bundle, coming to a stream which he must ford, made elaborate preparations by stripping off his garments, adding them to his bundle, and tying all to the top of a stick, which enabled him to raise the bundle high over his head to keep them dry during the crossing. He then fearlessly waded in and carefully made his way across the rippling stream, and found it in no place up to his ankles.

-Abraham Lincoln

Edgar Allan Poe

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.
-Edgar Allan Poe

Robert Frost

Words exist in the mouth not in books. You can't fix them and you don't want to fix them. You want them to adapt their sounds to persons and places and times. You want them to change and be different.

...Take, for instance, the expression 'oh.' The American poets use it in practicallly one tone, that of gradeur: 'Oh Soul!' 'Oh Hills!' 'Oh Anything!'That's the way they go. But think of what 'oh' is really capable: the 'oh' of scorn, the 'oh' of amusement, the 'oh' of surp[rise, the 'oh' of doubt- and there are many more."

- Robert Frost

Einstein - "Joyfully marches to music rank and file"

"He who joyfully marches to

music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been

given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord

would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be

done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate

all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be

torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my

conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an

act of murder." 

-Albert Einstein

"One of the strongest motives that

lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its

painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's

own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape

from the personal life into the world of objective perception and

thought."

-Albert Einstein

Vonnegut Scribble - August 10, 2004