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Quotes of the Day for 7 January 2005 - Performance

We have quite a crowd of performers in the birthday list for today. The flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal was born at Marseilles, France on this day in 1922. Paul Revere, leader of Boise, Idaho's Paul Revere and the Raiders, was born at Harvard, Nebraska on this day in 1938. Singer/songwriter Kenny Loggins was born at Everett, Washington on this day in 1948. (Everett is also the home of the Boeing 747 and the birthplace of the multi-talented Larkin.) Today's quotes relate to Performance.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way. You become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
     - Aristotle, 384 - 322 BC

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
     - Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, 1934 - 2002

The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.
     - Daniel Day Lewis

Concentration is everything. On the day I'm performing, I don't hear anything anyone says to me.
     - Luciano Pavarotti

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
     - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882

All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pick-ax or of one impression of the spade with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are levelled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings.
     - Dr Samuel Johnson, 1709 - 1784

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