Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.

The first, a quote from Voltaire, is contemptuous: “Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.” The second, an adage from the advertising profession, is tactical: “If you can’t make your case to an audience with facts, sing it to them.

In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.

Ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit, on le chante.

How stupid is it? I can’t talk about it I gotta sing about it And make a record of my heart

So I sang out the barbarous words - karaoke from Hell.

What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation — a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. "What is too silly to be said may be sung" — well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious — these things can also be sung and can only be sung.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

Presently I somehow found myself singing. The words were mere nonsense- irresponsible babble...Humanity would have rejected it with scorn. Nature, everywhere singing in the same key, recognized and accepted it without a flicker of dissent.

Aujourd'hui, ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit, on le chante.

... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

When you're in the shit up to your neck, there's nothing left to do but sing.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . .

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.