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)