My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems seeing a painting listening to some music some opera which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which more than any other ministers to the human spirit.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

I would say that although my music may be or may have been part of the cultural background fabric of the gay community I consider myself an outsider who belongs everywhere and nowhere... Being a human being is what truly counts. That's where you'll find me.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity and that being able to join in musical activity along with dancing could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

Music is a fantastic peacekeeper of the world it is integral to harmony and it is a required fundamental of human emotion.

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

For I have learned to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry painting and music are destroyed or flourish.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from everyone loves music.

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

The really courageous and bold thing is to make movies about human behaviour.

I like to think of myself as a fairly educated human being but I'm a very uneducated actor when it comes to movies directors producers actors for that matter.

Well the thing about great fictional characters from literature and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

I think people like to see the lives of artists that are legends. They always go through the dark periods and I think just as humans we like to see that and them coming out of it. I love those kinds of movies.

I really love the independent movies and I just think that sometimes when they throw a lot of money into it and a lot of special effects and a lot of stunts that you lose the connection the human connection and I personally love movies that are about the human connection.

I think what a lot of action movies lose these days especially the ones that deal with fantasy is you stop caring at some point because you've lost human scale.

Listen I think movies serve many different purposes from those movies that are frivolous and just an entertainment to movies that just go to exploring the complexities of the human soul. Everything is valid if it's done with honesty and dignity and I actually do both of those types of movies in my career.