THOUGHTS  on  MUSIC

from  writers  and  other  thinkers

It is the music that makes it what it is;

It is the music which changes the place

From the rear room of the saloon in back of the yards

To a fairy place, a wonderland, a little corner

In the high mansions of the sky.

( Upton Sinclair )

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts –

as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.

( Herbert Spencer )

I think of architecture as frozen music.

( Goethe )

It [Music] is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

( Samuel Johnson )

O’ Music!

A melody occurs to you;

you sing it silently, inwardly only.

You steep your being in it;

it takes possession of all your strength and emotions.

And during the time it lives in you,

it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse and sand in you.

It brings the world into harmony with you,

it makes burdens light

and gives wings to depressed spirits.

( Herman Hesse )

The moving accident is not my trade;

To freeze the blood I have no ready arts;

‘Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,

To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.

( William  Wordsworth )

Music produces the kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.

( Confucius )

Without music life would be a mistake.

( Nietzsche )

Those who wish to sing always find a song.

( Swedish Proverb )

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

( Rainer Maria Rilke )

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

( Leo Tolstoy )

Give me to hold all sounds, ( I madly struggling cry ),

Fill me with all the voices of the universe,

Endow me with their throbbings, Nature's also,

The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,

Utter, pour in, for I would take them all!

( Walt Whitman )

The interval of the fifth is a tickling of the eardrum

such that its softness is modified with sprightliness,

giving at the same time the impression

of a gentle kiss and of a bite.

( Galileo )

Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

( Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz )

Nothing exists without music, for the universe is said to have been framed

by a kind of harmony of sounds, and heaven itself

revolves under the tones of that harmony.

( St Isidore of Seville )

Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,

to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

( William Congreve )

Music can be used to correct any discord which may have arisen

in the courses of the soul.

( Plato )

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

( Santayana )

Music is the best means we have

of digesting time.

( WH Auden)

Music, of all the liberal arts,

has the greatest influence over the passions,

and it is that to which the legislator

ought to give the greatest encouragement.

( Napoleon Bonaparte )

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty

to study mathematics and philosophy, in order to give their children

a right to study painting, poetry and music.

( John Adams )

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes

and curl my back to loneliness.

( Maya Angelou )

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

It brings us near to the infinite.

( Thomas Carlyle )

I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.

( Nietzsche )

No sane man will dance.

( Cicero )

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis.

One must not wish first to understand and then to feel.

Art does not tolerate reason.

( Albert Camus )

No good opera plot can be sensible,

for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

( W. H. Auden )

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

( Anais Nin )

Music is the shaping of the invisible.

( da Vinci )

[Music is] the beautiful play of emotions.

( Emmanuel Kant )

He who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.

( Robert Browning )

Your life is strong,

But your song is stronger.

( Ranier Maria Rilke )

He who sings scares away his woes.

( Miguel de Cervantes )

Music is that art which to the greatest degree divests itself of corporeality

and is borne upon invisible, almost spiritual wings.

( Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling )

I'd hate for this to get out, but I really like opera.

( Ford Frick )

What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?

( Nathaniel Hawthorne )

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory.

( Shelley )

Music is love in search of a word.

( Sidney Lanier )

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

( Lawrence Durrell )

There’s sure no passion in the human soul, but finds its food in music.

( George Lillo )

After theology, I accord to music the highest place

and the greatest honor.

( Martin Luther )

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

( Kin Hubbard )

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which

it is impossible to be silent.

( Victor Hugo )

After silence, that which comes nearest

to expressing the inexpressible is music.

( Aldous Huxley )

When words leave off, music begins.

( Heinrich Heine )

You are the music while the music lasts.

( TS Eliot )

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

( Martin Luther )

Please do not shoot the pianist.  He is doing his best.

( Oscar Wilde )

An exotic and irrational entertainment.

( Samuel Johnson, on opera )

Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.

( Robert Benchley )

Composing a piece of music is very feminine. It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine.

( Barbara Kolb )

The city is built to music,

Therefore never built at all,

And therefore built forever.

( Alfred Lord Tennyson )

Hell is full of amateurs; music is the brandy of the damned.

( George Bernard Shaw )

Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?

( George Bernard Shaw )

When a man abandons himself to music, he begins to melt and liquefy.

( Plato )

All Art aspires to the condition of music.

( Paul Durcan )

Music, at its most sublime, becomes sheer form

and affects us with the serene power of antiquity.

( Friedrich von Schiller )

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

( Berthold Auerbach )

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it out

by one's conversation.

( Oscar Wilde )

Only sick music makes money today.

( Nietzsche )

Pull down the blinds, bring fiddle and clarionet

That there be no foot silent in the room

Nor mouth from kissing, nor from wine unwet…

( William  Butler  Yeats )

And one at my side blasts us space

with his trumpet, which flashes and screams out,

and blasts us back a black solitude

through which we race like a rapid dream.

( Ranier Maria Rilke )

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

here we sit, and let the sound of music creep in our ears:

soft stillness, and the night, become touches of sweet harmony.

( William  Shakespeare )

There's music in the sighing of a reed;

There's music in the gushing of a rill;

There's music in all things, if men had ears:

Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.

( Lord Byron )

Surely there was a time

I might have trod the sunlit heights,

And from life's dissonance

Struck one clear chord

To reach the ears of God.

( Oscar  Wilde )

With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,

I play not marches for accepted victors only,

I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons.

( Walt Whitman )

Music is a moral law.  It gives wings to the mind, a soul to the universe,

flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness – a life to everything.

( Plato )

Rhythm and melody enter into the soul of the well-instructed youth and produce there a certain mental harmony hardly obtainable in any other way.

( Plato )

Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating.

( Ayn Rand )

Nothing on earth is so well suited to make the sad merry,

the merry sad, to give courage to the despairing, to make the proud humble,

to lessen envy and hate, as music.

( Martin Luther )

The man that hath no music within himself

nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

the notions of his spirit are as dull as night

and his affections dark as Erebus:

let no such man be trusted.

( Shakespeare )

The truth is that

fullness of soul can sometimes overflow

in utter vapidity of language,

for none of us can ever express the exact measure

of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows.

And human speech is like a cracked kettle

on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to,

while we long to make music

that will melt the stars.

( Gustav Flaubert )