Twitter As A Quote Engine

Twitter is used in a lot of ways. One purpose I like is sharing quotes. I’ve always been, even from childhood, a fan of a good quote. I used to love thumbing through our family book of quotes and have dropped good quotes into essays, sermons, articles, blogposts and everyday conversation. Lately, I’ve even started to use more substantial quotes as tsrting points for musical explorations.

Of course, Twitter’s format makes it impossible to share long quotes, which means you won’t find many people recalling the best lines from Karl Barth or Henri Nouwen. Moreover, a lot of the Twitter quote traffic is the inane self-help kind of stuff that you see on motivational posters. But, pithiness is not always the enemy of substance. If you look there is some good stuff there.

Here’s a few quotes I’ve shared over the past few weeks,

“All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.” Thelonious Monk

“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” Rainer Maria Rilke

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” Epictetus

“Be content to seem what you really are.” Marcus Aurelius

“Nothing in music is hard, just unfamiliar.” Kenny Werner

“Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.”- Seneca

“A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are.” Alain de Botton

“I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good.” Mies van der Rohe

“To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.” Marcus Aurelius

And here’s a couple that have really caught my eye,

“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.” -Ayn Rand

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing a line somewhere.” G.K. Chesterton

[tags] Twitter, Social Media [/tags]