Music made her feel as if she were holding a lamp that cast a halo of light around her, and while she knew there were people and responsibilities in the darkness beyond it, she couldn't see them. The flame of what she felt when she played made her deliciously blind.

-- Marie Rutkoski

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

-- Plato

Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.

-- John Muir

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.

-- Joe Hill

Music fathoms the sky.

-- Charles Baudelaire

I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.

-- Virgil Thomson

I have always been resistant to doctrine, and any spirituality I had experienced thus far in my life had been much more abstract and not aligned with any recognized religion. For me, the most trustworthy vehicle for spirituality had always proven to be music. It cannot be manipulated, or politicized, and when it is, that becomes immediately obvious.

-- Eric Clapton

If we can feel that it is not our voice, not our fingers, but some reality deep inside our heart which is expressing itself, then we will know that it is the soul’s music.

-- Sri Chinmoy

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or
perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn't know. But I am
sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

-- Aaron Copland

Music links us humans, heart to heart...Across time and space, and life and death.

-- Nancy Werlin

A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists.

Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.

-- Vera Nazarian

I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning.

-- Plato

The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are.

-- Stephen J. Rivele

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

-- Marcel Marceau

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.

-- William Cowper

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

-- George Eliot

If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.

-- Confucius

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

-- Rebecca West

Music has power to create a universe or to destroy a civilization.

-- Katherin Neville

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

-- Andrew Schweitzer

Music defines us, for it shapes our souls and minds.

-- Jessica Carroll

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being. . . When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups. . . I want to speak to their souls.

-- John Coltrane

. . . A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

-- Guy de Maupassant

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning . . . except its own.

-- Leonard Bernstein

Music -- what a powerful instrument, what a mighty weapon!

-- Maria-Augusta von Trapp

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

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

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.

-- Frederic Chopin

He who sings scares away his woes.

-- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.

-- Leonard Bernstein

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.

-- Pablo Casals

Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

The artist must forget the audience,
forget the critics, forget the technique,
forget everything but love for the music.
Then, the music speaks through the performance,
and the performer and the listener will walk together
with the soul of the composer,
and with God.

-- Mstislav Rostropovich

We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself.

-- Hazrat Inayat Khan

To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?

-- Michael Jackson

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.
Mark the music.

-- William Shakespeare

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

-- Henry David Thoreau

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

-- Ludwig van Beethoven

No matter who we are, no matter what our circumstances, our feelings and emotions are universal. And music has always been a great way to make people aware of that connection. It can help you open up a part of yourself and express feelings you didn't know you were feeling. It's risky to let that happen. But it's a risk you have to take -- because only then will you find you're not alone.

-- Josh Groban

Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief.

Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music?

How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?

-- Orson Scott Card

Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.

-- Benjamin Disreaeli

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

-- Alphonse de Lamartine

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.

-- Albert Schweitzer

"I always ask the people in government, 'Who was your music teacher in school?'  When I know the name, then I know they understand the arts.  It's so important to get people in government who understand the arts!"

-- Romans Vanags

In response to the question, "Why is music important to humankind?"

"Any crisis requires harmony.  I believe harmony in life critically important because all the bad things that happen around us are based on inharmonious living.  I see this with my choirs; they are better people for being involved in music."

-- Romans Vanags, Latvian choral conductor

"For me, music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface, getting it back to that humble and tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again."

-- Paula Cole

"Choral music is not one of life's frills.  It's something that goes to the very heart of our humanity, our sense of community, and our souls.  You express, when you sing, your soul in song.  And when you get together with a group of other singers, it becomes more than the sum of the parts."

-- John Rutter

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song."

-- Joan Walsh Anglund

"Only there in sweet silence, could you feel the harmony of the spheres that the Greeks talked about, hear the rhythmic beat of Nature, and have a bit of understanding of the voice of God."

-- Satis Coleman

"From the days of primitive man, the arts have been employed by human beings for direct communication with the Unseen . . . from the simple hymn to Bach's Mass in B minor."

-- Satis Coleman

"Our deepest yearnings we cannot express except in some form of art."

-- Satis Coleman

"Who but those who have really entered into the world of arts and experienced its joys and exhilarations, its tranquility and its peace, can adequately interpret any form of faith?  True art is man's effort -- either conscious or unconscious effort -- to express the divine that is in him."

-- Satis Coleman