The only weapons I ever had were my cello and my baton.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how music and art can be powerful tools for expression and impact.
Pablo Casals emphasizes the profound influence of music in his life, suggesting that his cello and baton were not just instruments, but instruments of change. It conveys the idea that art can serve as a means of conveying messages, rather than resorting to violence or aggression, showcasing the transformative power of creativity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of the arts in education.
Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.
In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness... I see what people call God in all these things.
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.
I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life.
To the whole world you might be just one person, but to one person you might just be the whole world.
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.
Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.
I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.
A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem.
Because we're actors we can pretend and fake it, but I'd rather the intimate investment was authentic.
To think in terms of what the effect of a story is going to be, as opposed to trying to discover its inner logic, is one of the fundamental dangers in the process.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.