There falls the rhythmic beat of life and death:

Rapture wells forth, and all space is radiant with light.

There the Unstruck Music is sounded;

it is the music of the love of the three worlds.

There millions of lamps of sun and of moon are burning;

There the drum beats, and the lover swings in play.

There love-songs resound, and light rains in showers;

and the worshipper is entranced in the taste of the heavenly nectar.

Look upon life and death; there is no separation between them,

The right hand and the left hand are one and the same.

-- Kabir

(in Songs of Kabir,

translated by R. Tagore and E. Underhill)

Some to church repair,

Not for the doctrine, but the music there.

-- Alexander Pope

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. . . . He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. . . . . They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.

-- Hermann Hesse

(Siddhartha,

translated by Hilda Rosner)

I love you, gentlest of Ways,

who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,

you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,

you dark net threading through us . . .

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

(in Rilke's Book of Hours,

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Music is the voice of all humanity, of whatever time or place. In its presence we are one.

-- Charlotte Gray

(in Music Lovers Quotations,

edited by Helen Exley)