Saturday, June 30, 2012


Yet there is one thing the world with all its rottenness cannot take from us, and that is the deep and abiding joy and consolation perpetuate in great music.  Here the spirit may find home and relief when all else fails.

-- Eric Fenby
(in Notations: Quotations on Music,
edited by Sallye Leventhal)

Saturday, June 23, 2012


I do not know what I was playing,
     Or what I was dreaming then;
But I stuck one chord of music,
     Like the sound of a great Amen.

-- Adelaide Anne Procter
(in Music:  A Book of Quotations,
edited by Herb Galewitz)

Saturday, June 16, 2012


The problem with listening, of course, is that we don't.

-- Philip Glass
(in Divine Sparks:  Collected Wisdom of the Heart,
edited by Karen Speerstra)

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Love thrilled the chord of love in my soul's lute,
And changed me all to love from head to foot.

-- Unattributed Sufi poet
(in The Mystics of Islam,
by Reynold A. Nicholson)

Saturday, June 2, 2012


Music is the divine influence which stirs the heart to seek God:  those who listen to it spiritually attain unto God, and those who listen to it sensually fall into unbelief.

-- Dhu 'l-Nun the Egyptian
(in The Mystics of Islam, by Reynold A. Nicholson)