Music is a language that doesn't speak in particular words.  It speaks in emotions, and if it's in the bones, it's in the bones.

-- Keith Richards

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

-- Bruce Springsteen

I had accepted the idea that the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making one susceptible to divine influences.

-- John Cage

The experience of transcending the ego and losing the self in music extends to the listener as well as the creator.  Composers and artists have the power to transport the listener to ecstatic states that many have described as an experience of union of the self with a higher power.

-- Richard Wolf

We often think of silence as an absence of sound, but silence is the presence of nonsound that incubates the potentialities of sound.  We think of stillness as an absence of movement, but it is actually the presence of the ground of being.  We think of peace as the absence of conflict, but it is the presence of a pure and pleasing calm: a relaxed and liberated awareness.

-- Richard Wolf