Saturday, December 31, 2011


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)

Saturday, December 24, 2011


If you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth:
Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.
The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself,
and he is the one who has made it all.

-- Kabir
(translated by Robert Bly,
in The Enlightened Heart,
compiled by Stephen Mitchell)

Saturday, December 17, 2011


Art is . . . a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

-- Leo Tolstoy
(in What is Art?)

Saturday, December 10, 2011


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

Saturday, December 3, 2011


The soul of man is like the rolling world,
One half in day, the other dipt in night;
The one has music and the flying cloud,
The other, silence and the wakeful stars.

-- Alexander Smith
(in Notations: Quotations on Music,
edited by Sallye Leventhal)