Let your throat-song

be clear and strong enough

to make an emperor fall full-length,

suppliant, at the door.

-- Rumi

(The Essential Rumi,

translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne)

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence -- that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

-- Henry David Thoreau

(Walden, Or Life in the Woods)

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

-- Maurice Ravel

When I was a little child there used to be two blind performers in Rajkot. One of them was a musician. When he played on his instrument, his fingers swept the strings with an unerring instinct and everybody listened spellbound to his playing. Similarly there are chords in every human heart. If we only knew how to strike the right chord, we would bring out the music.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

(in The Essential Gandhi,

edited by Louis Fischer)