God is its author, and not man; he laid the keynote of all harmonies . . . and he made us so that we could hear and understand.

-- John G. Brainard

 

Music is our fourth great material want -- first food, then raiment, then shelter, then music.

-- Christian Nestell Bover

 

Music wasn't made to make us wise, but better natured.

-- Josh Billings

 

Music . . . can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

-- Leonard Bernstein

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

-- Ludwig van Beethoven

 

The sole end and aim of all music should be nothing else but God's glory and pleasant recreation.

-- Johann Sebastian Bach

 

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

-- Berthold Auerbach

 

Where words fail, music speaks.

-- Hans Christian Anderson

 

Music is the only sensual gratification which mankind may indulge in to excess without injury to their moral and religious feelings.

-- Joseph Addison

 Music, the greatest good that mortals know,

And all of heaven we have below.

-- Joseph Addison 

 

Music is very spiritual, it has the power to bring people together.

-- Edgar Winter

 

I prefer to learn everything through music.  If you want divinity, the music in every human being and their love for music is pretty much it.  It's the big indication of their spirituality and their ability to love and make love, or feel pain or joy, and really manifest it, really be real.

-- Jeff Buckley

 

Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex.  But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at.  It is a spiritual state of oneness.

-- Terry Riley

 

There's a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression.  It doesn't have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual.

-- John Towner Williams

When the human being hears music, he has a sense of wellbeing, because these tones harmonize with what he has experienced in the world of his spiritual home.

-- Rudolf Steiner

 

Whether a person is spiritual or not, we all seek to get away from the stress, anger, and anxiety of everyday life.  Some people drink, do drugs, or do worse to escape, and they hurt themselves in the process.  Some people listen to music, mine included, and feel better. 

-- Yanni

 

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

-- Ludwig van Beethoven

 

There is no complete spiritual life without music, for the human soul has regions which can be illuminated only by music.

-- Zoltan Kodaly

 

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

 

Music . . . began with man, primitive man, trying to duplicate Nature's sounds -- winds, birds, animals, water, the crescendo of fire -- after which great systems of learning were set up, only to discover that music is limitless.

-- Duke Ellington

 

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

-- Rebecca West

 

Music is the only religion that really delivers the goods.

-- Frank Zappa

 

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that reemerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh.  A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me. 

-- Jean Genet

 

People say that the soul, on hearing the song of creation, entered the body, but in reality the soul itself was the song.

-- Hafiz

The prime objective of all Initiatory music in the Temples of Antiquity was to bring about physical purification and renewal, mental stimulation and alertness, spiritual exhilaration and Illumination.

-- St. Ambrose 

 

Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.

-- William Shakespeare

 

Music is the art of the prophets, the only art that can calm the agitations of the soul.

-- Martin Luther

 

Man's music is seen as a means of restoring the soul, as well as confused and discordant bodily afflictions, to the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.

-- Plato

 

By harmony all phenomena are formed and sustained.  There is a scientific statement to the effect that this earth is a vast harmonic wave system that is built and sustained by unheard music.

-- Corinne Heline

 

Life is a song.  It has its own rhythm of harmony.  It is a symphony of all things which exist in major and minor keys of Polarity.  It blends the discords, by opposites, into harmony which unites the whole into a grand symphony of life.  To learn through experience in this life, to appreciate the symphony and lessons of life and to blend with the whole, is the object of our being here.

-- Dr. Randolph Stone

Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony.

-- Leonardo da Vinci

 

The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe.

-- Hazrat Inayat Khan

 

Music has healing power.  It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.

-- Elton John

 

Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness.

-- Jason Mraz

 

If there is one thing that is constant in this world, it is the power of music.

-- Josh Groban

 

The power of music to integrate and cure . . . is quite fundamental.  It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.

-- Oliver Sacks

 

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language, it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.

-- Robert Green Ingersoll

 

I think music in itself is healing.  It's an explosive expression of humanity.

-- Billy Joel

 

Music gives color to the air of the moment.

-- Karl Lagerfeld

 

The object of all music should be the glory of God and pleasant recreation.

-- Johann Sebastian Bach