"Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible." ~Victor de LaPrade

"Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself." ~Henry Ward Beecher

"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together." ~Anais Nin

"Music, like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy." ~Jean Baptiste Montegut

"Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue." ~Plato

"Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable." ~Martin Luther (1483 - 1546)

"The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other is by music." ~Jonathan Edwards

"The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul." Johann Sebastian Bach

"Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does good. Our love is due to both." ~Henri Frederic Amiel

"Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend." ~Ludwig van Beethoven, quoted by Bettina von Arnin, letter to Goethe, 1810

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent." ~Victor Hugo

"Where words fail, music speaks." ~Hans Christian Andersen

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." ~Aldous Huxley

"There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is." ~William P. Merrill

"Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words." ~Robert G. Ingersoll

"A song will outlive all sermons in the memory." ~Henry Giles

"Next to theology I give to music the highest place and honor. And we see how David and all the saints have wrought their godly thoughts into verse, rhyme, and song." ~Martin Luther

"Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous." ~Yehudi Menuhin

"Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal." ~Pierre Boulez

"Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without." ~Confucius

"I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music." ~George Eliot (1819 - 1880)

"Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life." ~Ludwig van Beethoven

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels." ~Thomas Carlyle

"Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace." ~Leonard Bernstein

"I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality." ~H.A. Overstreet

"When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead." ~Igor Stravinsky

"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music." ~Albert Einstein

"Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory." ~Sir Thomas Beecham

"When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had." ~Edgar Watson Howe

"A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges." ~Benny Green

"Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!" ~J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

"It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites—opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity—where energies flow smoothly in one direction—there will be much doing but no music." ~Eric Hoffer

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony." ~Benjamin Britten

"Music has charms to soothe the savage beast, to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak." ~William Congreve

"If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music." ~Thomas Carlyle

"To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable." ~Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990)

"Music lives in three tenses at once. Developing what comes before it in the past, it engages us in the present, and inspires our hopes for its future." ~Warren Benson, Professor of Composition at The Eastman School of Music

"Music . . . can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable." ~Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990)

"Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong." ~Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends." ~Alphonse de Lamartine

"Music is love in search of a word." ~Sidney Lanier

"Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate." ~Arnold Bennett

"Music is an outburst of the soul." ~Frederick Delius

"Music is the vernacular of the human soul." ~Geoffrey Latham

"You are the music while the music lasts." ~T.S. Eliot

"The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life… the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril." ~Richard Baker

"Without music, life is a journey through a desert." ~Pat Conroy

"Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body." ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Music is the poetry of the air." ~Richter

"There is no truer truth obtainable
By Man than comes of music." ~Robert Browning

"The pause is as important as the note." ~Truman Fisher

"In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain." ~George Szell

"'When griping griefs the heart doth wound,
   And doleful dumps the mind oppress,
Then music with her silver sound—
...With speedy help doth lend redress.'" ~Peter in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 5.1.126-128,142

"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music."
~Shakespeare, (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.83-88)

"Sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony." ~Sir Thomas Browne (1605 - 1682)

"It is in learning music that many youthful hearts learn to love." ~Ricard

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." ~William F. Buckley, Jr.

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow." ~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

"People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet." ~Witold Lutoslawski

"If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong." ~Simon Rattle

"Already too loud!" ~Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments

"There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect." ~Thomas Mann

"Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk." ~Oscar Wilder

"Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" ~William Shakespeare

"I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartettes, chamber music, and cantatas." ~S.J. Perelman

"We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself. In the cradle it is moving its little arms and legs in a certain rhythm. And when our music falls on the ears of an infant it is of the lowest character compared with the music it is accustomed to." ~Hazrat Inayat Khan

"The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others." ~William Lyon Phelps

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony."
~Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.54-57)