"Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music."

-- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

"Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul."

-- Johann Sebastian Bach

"My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary."

-- Martin Luther

"You have to take a deep breath and allow the music to flow through you.  Revel in it, allow yourself to awe.  When you play allow the music to break your heart with its beauty."

-- Kelly White

"Music is an outburst of the soul."

-- Frederick Delius

"Music is the great uniter.  An incredible force.  Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common."

-- Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

"Music . . . will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Music in the soul can be heard by the universe."

-- Lao Tzu

"Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens."

-- Maria Augusta von Trapp

"Music is the language of the spirit.  It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife."

-- Kahlil Gibran

"If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing."

-- J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence."

-- Robert Fripp

"Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human.  Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe."

-- Douglas Adams

"I love the relationship that anyone has with music . . . because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out . . . It's the best part of us probably . . . "

-- Nick Hornby

"He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful.  Into something that people connect to.  And that's what good music does.  It speaks to you.  It changes you."

-- Hannah Harrington, Saving June

"Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once."

-- Robert Browning, The Complete Poetical Works of Browning

"Where words fail, music speaks."

-- Hans Christian Andersen

"A painter paints pictures on canvas.  But musicians paint their pictures on silence."

-- Leopold Stokowski

"Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances."

-- Maya Angelou

"The only truth is music."

-- Jack Kerouac

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC."

-- Kurt Vonnegut

"Life, he realized, was much like a song.  In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile."

-- Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song

"Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music
And death a note unsaid.

-- Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

"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

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

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

-- Victor Hugo

The making of music is the everlasting and inescapable act of creation.  The life of music is reborn at every singing.  It actually doesn't exist on paper, but in time and in sound.  It has existed in the composer's spirit, but at each singing it seeks a new life.  And the performer, though his craft is that of representation and his proper approach that of humility, cannot escape the responsibilities of creation.  And that has some moral reference.

-- Robert Shaw

. . . The arts have a chance to become what the history of man has shown that they should be: the guide and impetus to human understanding, individual integrity, and the common good.  They are not an opiate, an avoidance, or a barrier, but a unifying spirit and labor.

-- Robert Shaw

It is entirely possible that out of the whole history of the Western world, Bach is the single greatest creative genius.

The thing that essentially qualifies Bach's music is that though it's technically masterful and such, it maintains a humanity that is as natural as the Negro spiritual.  It's extraordinarily human music.  The thing that makes his music last is not its intellectualization but its consummate humanity and the fact that it is simple human emotion in extraordinary persistence and renaissance.  Every time it renews itself, it's a resurrection.

-- Robert Shaw

Since I think the Arts are sort of the last residence of personal integrity, they have a lot to say about the . . . fellowship of human beings.  People who make music together ultimately end up respecting one another and also have a good sense to respect the creator, who is the composer, more than they do their own performance.  This builds a humility and a tolerance of other human beings that I think is essential to a civilization.

-- Robert Shaw

Our voice is our most creative and musical instrument.  It has great power to touch our lives and the lives of others.

-- Ted Andrews

Bach opens a vista to the universe.  After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.

-- Helmut Walcha

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible.

-- Victor de LaPrade

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.

-- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Music can noble hints impart,
Engender fury, kindle love,
With unsuspected eloquence can move,
And manage all the man with secret art.

-  Joseph Addison

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

-- Henry David Thoreau

Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

If in the afterlife there is not music, we will have to import it.

-- Domenico Cieri Estrada

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

-- William P. Merrill

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

All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!

-- Thomas Carlyle

The end of all good music is to affect the soul.

-- Claudio Monteverdi

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

-- Plato

Every act, every deed of justice and mercy and benevolence, makes heavenly music in Heaven.

-- Ellen G. White

Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.

-- Henri Frederic Amiel

Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

-- Henry Ward Beecher

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have here below.

-- Joseph Addison

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

-- Walter Savage Landor

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.

-- Lao Tzu

What love is to man, music is to the arts and to mankind.

-- Carla Maria von Weber

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful present God has given us.

-- Martin Luther

I can only think of music as somethng inherent in every human being -- a birthright.  Music coordinates mind, body and spirit.

-- Yehudi Menuhin