Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.

We have fallen into the place 
where everything is music.

The strumming and flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world's harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing.

-- Rumi (Coleman Barks translation)

 

I wish I could speak like divine music.  I want to give you the sublime rhythms
Of this earth and the sky's limbs.  As they joyously spin and surrender,
Surrender
Against God's luminous breath.  Hafiz wants you to hold me
Against your precious
Body and dance,
Dance.

-- Hafiz

 

I wish I could speak like music.  I wish I could put the swaying splendor
Of the fields into words so that you could hold Truth
Against your body
And dance.  I am trying the best I can
With this crude brush, the tongue, to cover you with light.

-- Hafiz

 

What a wonderful lotus it is, that blooms at the heart of the spinning wheel of the universe!  
Only a few pure souls know of its true delight.  
Music is all around it, and there the heart partakes of the joy of the Infinite Sea.  Kabir says:  "Dive thou into that Ocean of sweetness:  thus let all errors of life and of death flee away."

-- Kabir

 

There the whole sky is filled with sound, and there that music is made without fingers and without strings;
There the game of pleasure and pain does not cease.
Kabir says:  "If you merge your life in the Ocean of Life, you will find your life in the Supreme Land of Bliss."

-- Kabir

 

Where words fail, music speaks.

-- Hans Christian Andersen

 

Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

-- Plato

 

To sing is to pray twice.

-- St. Augustine

 

If you try to suppress the arts, then you're suppressing the deepest dreams and aspirations of a people.

-- Barack Obama

 

I often think in music.  I live my daydreams in music. 

-- Albert Einstein

 

Many say that life entered the human body by the help of music, but the truth is that life itself is music.

-- Hafiz

 

The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury.  Music, now, more than ever before, is a national need.  There is no better way to express patriotism than through music. 

-- Woodrow Wilson

 

A man can find out more about himself and his power of inner thinking through his reaction to music than all the Freuds or Jungs that have ever lived could tell him.

-- Albert S. Williams

 

Life has been your art.  You have set yourself to music.  Your days are your sonnets.

-- Oscar Wilde

 

Good music is wine turned to sound.

-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,

It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of the women's chorus.

It is nearer and farther than they.

-- Walt Whitman

 

The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung. 

-- Walt Whitman

 

Music comes before religion, as emotion comes before thought, and sound before sense.  What is the first thing you hear when you go into a church?  The organ playing.

-- Alfred North Whitehead

 

Music is the true universal speech of mankind.

-- Weber

 

Music is a language directed to the passions; but the rudest passions put on a new nature and become pleasing in harmony.

-- James Usher

 

Music hath caught a higher place than any virtue I know.  It is the arch-reformer; it hastens the sun to its setting; it invites him to its rising; it is the sweetest reproach, a measured satire.

-- Henry David Thoreau

 

Music is the crystallisation of sound.

-- Henry David Thoreau

 

Singing is sweet, but be sure of this,
Lips only sing when they cannot kiss.

The wine of love is music,
And the fest of Love is song.

-- James Thomson

 

The God of Music dwelleth out of doors.
All seasons through his minstrelsy we meet,
Breathing by field and covert haunting-sweet.

-- Edith M. Thomas

 

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 

You and I are part of the universal orchestra that produces this music of heaven.  We are musicians as well as instruments.  When the essence of the Tao flows through us, soundless tones emerge to form a transcendent song.  This song is the purest expression of the soul.

-- Derek Lin

 

Lightlier move the minutes edged with music.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 

For a day and a night Love sang to us, played with us,
Folded us round from the dark and the light;
And our hearts were fulfilled with the music he made with us.

-- A. C. Swinburne

 

. . . but the highest reaches of music come thrillingly close to the central core and essence of life itself.

-- Leopold Stokowski

 

The habit of listening to music and of dreaming about it predisposes one to love.

-- Stendhal

 

The fine art which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.  Where there is beautiful music it is difficult for discontent to to live.

-- Herbert Spencer

 

Discord ofte in music makes the sweeter lay.

--  Edward Spencer

 

Music:  the paradise of the ears.

-- Somaize

 

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

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

He is made one with Nature:  there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain-tops that freeze;
Bow themselves, when he did sing.

-- William Shakespeare

 

Here we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Became the touches of sweet harmony.

-- William Shakespeare

 

Preposterous ass, that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordain'd:
Was it not to refresh the mind of man,
After his studies or his usual pain?

-- William Shakespeare

 

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, 
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

-- William Shakespeare

 

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, 
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

 -- William Shakespeare