Those Who Do Not Dance

An invalid girl asked,

"How do I dance?"

We told her:

let your heart dance.

Then the crippled girl asked,

"How do I sing?"

We told her:

let your heart sing.

A poor dead thistle asked,

"How do I dance?"

We told it,

let your heart fly in the wind.

God asked from on high,

"How do I come down from this blueness?"

We told Him:

come dance with us in the light.

The entire valley is dancing

in a chorus under the sun.

The hearts of those absent

return to ashes.

-- Gabriela Mistral (trans. by Maria Giachetti)

(in Women in Praise of the Sacred,

edited by Jane Hirshfield)

The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.

-- Igor Stravinsky

(in Divine Sparks,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

Music is love in search of a word.

-- Sidney Lanier

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

Every work of art has two faces, one directed towards eternity and the other towards its own time. . . . As human beings we do not possess infinite qualities, but as musicians I believe we can extend our finite power to a point where we can create an illusion of infinity. It is only be knowing ourselves that we come to know the things outside ourselves.

-- Daniel Barenboim

(in Notations: Quotation on Music,

edited by Sallye Leventhal)

Though people today no longer know why, the mysteries refer to the existence of two kinds of cognition, ordinary bodily, intellectual cognition and spiritual cognition, which is in fact, a musical cognition, a cognition living in the musical element.

-- Rudolf Steiner

(in Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

When we are touched by mystic grace and allow ourselves to enter its field without fear, we see that we are all parts of a whole, elements of an universal harmony, unique, essential and sacred notes in a divine music that everyone and everything is playing together with us in God and for God.

-- Andrew Harvey

(in The Essential Mystics)

And yet, though we strain

against the deadening grip

of daily necessity,

I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?

Is it the things themselves,

or something waiting inside them,

like an unplayed melody in a flute?

. . .

Who lives it, then? God, are you the one

who is living life?

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

(in Rilke's Book of Hours,

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

-- Berthold Auerbach

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

O Universe, all that is in tune with you is also in tune with me! Every note of your harmony resonates in my innermost being. For me nothing is early and nothing is late, if it is timely for you. . . .

Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be. Become one yourself!

-- Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations

(in The Essential Mystics,

edited by Andrew Harvey)

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

-- Marion C. Garretty

(in Music Lovers Quotations,

edited by Helen Exley)

What a strange, wondrous thing, music. At last the chattering mind is silenced. No past to regret, no future to worry about, no more frantic knitting of words and thoughts. Only a beautiful, soaring nonsense. Sound -- made pleasing and intelligible through melody, rhythm, harmony and counterpoint -- becomes our thinking. The grunting of language and the drudgery of semiotics are left behind. Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.

-- Yann Martel

(in the short story, "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton" found in the short story collection, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios)

People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least while the music lasts.

-- Paul Hindemith

(in The Music-Lover's Birthday Book,

edited by Alden R. Murphy)

The harp gives forth murmurous music;

and the dance goes on

without hands and feet.

It is played without fingers,

it is heard without ears:

for He is the ear,

and He is the listener.

The gate is locked,

but within there is fragrance:

and there the meeting is seen of none.

The wise shall understand it.

-- Kabir

(from Songs of Kabir,

edited by R. Tagore and E. Underhill)

Music is the memory bank for finding one's way about the world.

-- Bruce Chatwin

(in Divine Sparks,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

Music speaks of Platonic truth --

the ideal river

rather than the polluted reality,

love as we dream it

rather than we experience it,

grief noble and uplifting

rather than our distracted weeping.

It is necessary to our survival and our sanity.

-- Pam Brown

(in Music Lovers Quotations,

edited by Helen Exley)

“A Prayer for Peace”

Dona nobis pacem.

Grant us peace.

I prayed for peace within myself

And I was given fear

That I might learn openness

That I might learn faith

That I might learn hope

And that peace begins in my heart.

I prayed for peace with my neighbor

And I was given strife

That I might learn tolerance

That I might learn forgiveness

That I might learn compassion

And that peace begins in my heart.

We prayed for peace between nations

And we were given war

That we might learn respect for life

That we might learn justice

That we might learn a shared vision

And that peace begins in our hearts.

Dona nobis pacem.

Grant us peace.

-- Carla J. Giomo

(written in response to the events of 9/11;

available as SATB choral anthem from

Yelton Rhodes Press)

The flute of the Infinite is played without ceasing,

and its sound is love:

When love renounces all limits,

it reaches truth.

How widely the fragrance spreads!

It has no end, nothing stands in its way.

The form of this melody is bright like a million suns:

incomparably sounds the vina,

the vina of the notes of truth.

-- Kabir

(in Songs of Kabir,

translated by Rabindranath Tagore

and Evelyn Underhill)

Playing the blues was a way of exorcising the specter of random force, turning cosmic uncertainty into a song.

-- Jackson Lears

(in Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

Life has been your art.

You have set yourself to music.

Your days are your sonnets.

-- Oscar Wilde

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

Birdsong brings relief

of my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are,

but with nothing to say!

Please, universal soul, practice

some song, or something, through me!

-- Rumi

(in The Essential Rumi,

translated by Coleman Barks

with John Moyne)

May the thread of my song be not cut before my life merges in the sea of love.

-- The Rig Veda

(in God Makes the Rivers to Flow,

edited by Eknath Easwaran)

Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.

-- Plato (Aristocles)

(in Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

Before we make music, music makes us . . .

Music's deep structure is identical with the deep structure of all things.

-- George Leonard

(in Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

Music is God's best gift to man, the only art of heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to heaven.

-- Walter Savage Landor

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

Music attracts the angels in the universe.

-- Bob Dylan

(in Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of years

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

(from Rilke's Book of Hours,

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Necessity holds on her knees the spindle around which the circles of the world turn: a siren is seated on each of these circles; each sings a note and these notes form the most perfect harmonies. This is the music of the world heard by souls before they descend into bodies . . . Musical instruments and voices are only a distant echo of the sublime music of creation.

-- Plato

(in Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

The Ancient wrapped the whole world in a web of song.

-- Bruce Chatwin

(in Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust -- we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

-- Albert Einstein

(quoted in The Divine Matrix

by Gregg Braden)

As far as I'm concerned, it's the artists who are going to save the world if it's ever going to be saved. Most of the great artists are searching for truth and beauty. That's a lot better than how many weapons can we make, how many other countries can we destroy, how many soldiers are going to get killed. It's the opposite.

-- Tony Bennett (Antonio Benedetto)

(quoted in The Arizona Republic, May 30, 2010)

Music stirs me, for you

Sea and

Cloud

Mountain and Star

touch me for you.

Alien things only turn

the whole prayer of my heart

to you

All noble paintings

wake the dream of you

All singing lines

lead home to your memory --

Beauty is everywhere kin.

-- Ricarda Huch

(in Heaven's Face Thinly Veiled,

edited by Sarah Anderson)

The power of music is so great that in the legends of all nations, the invention of the art is ascribed to the gods.

-- Karl Merz

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

But as a child of twelve months old or less,

That laboreth his language to express,

Even so fare I, and therefore, I thee pray,

Guide thou my song which I of thee shall say.

- Geoffrey Chaucer

(in The Book of Uncommon Prayer,

edited by Constance and Daniel Pollock)

All of one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time.

-- John Ruskin

(in Notations: Quotations on Music,

edited by Sallye Leventhal)

When you play, do not trouble yourself as to who is listening.

Yet always play as though a master listened to you.

-- Robert Schumann

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

'Tis not the air I wished to play,

The strain I wished to sing;

My wilful spirit slipped away

And struck another string.

I neither wanted smile nor tear,

Bright joy nor bitter woe,

But just a song that sweet and clear,

Though haply sad, might flow.

-- Charlotte Bronte

(in The Things That Matter:

An Anthology of Women's Spiritual Poetry,

edited by Julia Neuberger)

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

-- George Santayana

(in Notations: Quotations on Music,

edited by Sallye Leventhal)

The world is no more than the Beloved's single face;

In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist.

Each place, each moment, sings its particular song

of not-being and being.

-- Ghalib

(in The Enlightened Heart,

edited by Stephen Mitchell)

Music is making manifest to our dull ears the divine harmony of the universe, and through music, we read the universal.

-- Elbert Hubbard

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

The Light of Eternal Love

And I press on with a lighter heart

Through all the ways of the endless rings.

The pure word of the living God

Moves in the depths of them and sings.

Unhampered now by fierce desire

We follow and find no ending here

Till in the light of eternal Love

We melt, we disappear.

-- Johann Wolfgang van Goethe

(in The Book of Uncommon Prayer,

edited by Constance and Daniel Pollack)

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

-- Victor Hugo

(in Music Lovers Quotations,

edited by Helen Exley)

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

-- Thomas Carlyle

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

The song of the flute, O sister, is madness.

I thought that nothing that was not God could hold me,

But hearing that sound, I lose mind and body,

My heart wholly caught in the net.

O flute, what were your vows, what is your practice?

What power sits by your side?

Even Mira's Lord is trapped in Your seven notes.

-- Mirabai

(in Women in Praise of the Sacred,

edited by Jane Hirshfield)

Music is a shower-bath of the soul, washing away all that is impure.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

You are the notes, and we are the flute.

We are the mountain, you are the sounds coming down.

We are the pawns and kings and rooks

you set out on a board; we win or we lose.

We are lions rolling and unrolling on flags.

Your invisible wind carries us through the world.

-- Rumi

(in The Enlightened Heart,

edited by Stephen Mitchell)

What is music? . . . The very existence of music is wonderful, I might even say miraculous. Its domain is between thought and phenomena. Like a twilight mediator, it hovers between spirit and matter, related to both, yet differing from each. It is spirit, but it is spirit subject to the measurement of time. It is matter but it is matter than can dispense with space.

-- Heinrich Heine

(in Music Lovers Quotations,

edited by Helen Exley)

There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is.

-- William P. Merrill

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

The Spirit lasts -- but in what mode --

Below, the Body speaks,

But as the Spirit furnishes --

Apart, it never talks --

The Music in the Violin

Does not emerge alone

But Arm in Arm with Touch, yet Touch

Alone -- is not a Tune --

The Spirit lurks within the Flesh

Like Tides within the Sea

That make the Water live, estranged

What would the Either be?

-- Emily Dickinson

(in Heaven's Face Thinly Veiled,

edited by Sarah Anderson)

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.

-- Charlie Parker

(in Notations: Quotations on Music,

edited by Sallye Leventhal)

All day and night, music,

a quiet, bright

reedsong. If it

fades, we fade.

-- Rumi

(from The Enlightened Heart,

edited by Stephen Mitchell)

. . . but the highest reaches of music come thrillingly close to the central core and essence of life itself.

--- Leopold Stokowski

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear . . .

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else . . .

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

-- Walt Whitman

(from Walt Whitman: Selected Poems)