Keith Jarrett

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

The connection between us runs so strong and deep. It’s like a steel cable stretching across the ocean bed, so many fathoms below, that even the most skilled and courageous of deep sea divers cannot reach it to cut it. It remains strong, silent, invisible, invincible.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education and religion may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Be a lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.