. . . A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

-- Guy de Maupassant

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning . . . except its own.

-- Leonard Bernstein

Music -- what a powerful instrument, what a mighty weapon!

-- Maria-Augusta von Trapp

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton