Famous quotes containing the words noise and, noise, vibration and/or convention:
“But what it was, alas, I cannot tell,
Because of it I had no perfect view;
But as it was, by guess, I wish it well
And will until I see the same anew.
Shadow, or she, or both, or choose you whither:
Blest be the thing that brought the shadow hither.”
—Unknown. I Heard a Noise and Wishèd for a Sight (l. 13–18)
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.”
—Jacques Attali (b. 1943)
“All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)