The flute is not an instrument that has a good moral effectöit is too exciting.

-Aristotle
c.330  BC  Politics.

There is nothing to it.You only have to hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

-Bach,Johann Sebastian
Of the organ. Quoted in K Geiringer The Bach Family (1954).

You have between your legs the most sensitive Beerbohm instrument knowntoman, and all youcandoisscratch it.

-Beecham, SirThomas
Attributed rebuke to a female cellist. Quoted in Ian Crofton and Donald Fraser  A Dictionary of Musical Quotations (1985).

Prosperity is onlyaninstrumentto be used, not a deity to be worshipped. 236

-Coolidge, (John) Calvin
  Speech, Boston,11  Jun.

Since I am coming to that holy room Where, withThy choir of saints forevermore, I shall be madeThy Music, as I come I tune the instrument here at the door, And what I must do then, think now before.

-Donne,John
c.1623  'Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness'.

Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.

-Ernst, Max
Quoted in Saranne  Alexandrian Surrealist  Art (1970).

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

-Franklin, Benjamin
Attributed prayer, traditionally known as the'Prayer of St Francis'.

Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion.When a president or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people. Any other interpretation is nonsense.

-Gallup, George Horace
  NBC news,1 Dec.

Iamnot yet so lost inlexicographyastoforgetthat words arethe daughters of earth, and thatthings arethesons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but thesigns of ideas: Iwish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
  A Dictionary of the English Language, preface.

No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

-Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y
  Responding to claims that his Communism was a mere caprice. Quoted in Alfred H BarrJr Picasso: FiftyYears of His Art (1946).

Sport, rightly conceived, is an occupation carried out by the whole man. It renders the body a more perfect instrument of the soul and at the same time makes the soul itself a finer instrument of the whole man in seeking forTruth and in transmitting it to others. In this way it helps a man to reach that End to which all other ends are subordinate, the service and the greater glory of his Creator.

-Pius XII real name Eugenio Pacelli
  Speech to the Central School of Sports of the USA, 29 Jul.

   The power to learn is present in everyone's soul, and the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body.

-Plato
Republic, bk.7, 518c (translated by G M A Grube, revised by C D C Reeve).

En re¤  alite¤  , chaque lecteur est, quand il lit, le propre lecteur de soi-me"  me. L'ouvrage de l'e¤  crivain n'est qu'une espe'  ce d'instrument optique qu'il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que, sans ce livre, il n'e u" t peut-e"  tre pas vu en soi-me"  me. In reality, each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is onlya kind of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable him to discover in himself what he could not have found but for the aid of the book.

-Proust, Marcel
' 1927  A la recherche du temps perdu,'LeTemps retrouve¤ ' .

He turned the old one-stringed instrument into a many- chorded lyre† W.G. discovered batting; he turned its many narrow straight channels into one great winding river.

-Ranjitsinhji, Prince
  Of W G Grace.TheJubilee Book of Cricket.

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

-Rich, Adrienne Cecile
TheWill to Change,'Planetarium'.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetryadministers to the effect byacting on the cause.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
A Defence of Poetry.

He found that a fork in his inexperienced hand was an instrument of chase rather than capture.

-Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge)
  Kipps, bk.2, ch.7.