Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, and the only art of earth we take to Heaven.

-- Walter Savage Landor

There are only two things worth aiming for, good music and a clean conscience.

-- Paul Hindemith

Music is a thing that changes people's lives.  It has the capacity to make young people's lives better.

-- Noel Gallagher

Music exists for the purpose of growing an admirable heart.

-- Shinichi Suzuki

Music is very spiritual, it has the power to bring people together.

-- Edgar Winter

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

-- Aaron Copland

Many people die with their music still in them.  Why is this so?  Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live.  Before they know it, time runs out.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

-- Marcel Marceau

Music is love in search of a word.

-- Sidney Lanier

Music must rank as the highest of the fine arts -- as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

-- Herbert Spencer

A sense of the universe, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music -- these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.  Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

-- Khalil Gibran

Music is the social act of communication among people, a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is.

-- Malcolm Arnold

Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.

-- Jean Paul

Music is the harmonious voice of creation, an echo of the invisible world.

-- Giuseppe Mazzini

Music has healing power.  It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.

-- Elton John

There is geometry in the humming of the strings,
there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

-- Pythagoras

Music is therapy.  Music moves people.  It connects people in ways no other medium can.  It pulls heart strings.  It acts as medicine.

-- Macklemore

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

-- Pat Conroy

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

-- Plato

I think music in itself is healing.  It's an explosive expression of humanity.  It's something we are all touched by.  No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

-- Billy Joel

Music can change the world because it can change people.

-- Bono

The true beauty of music is that it connects people.  It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.

-- Roy Ayers

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.

-- Lao Tzu

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

-- Martin Luther

Music is a moral law.  It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

-- Plato

Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life.  There's not some trick involved with it.  It's pure and it's real.  It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.

-- Tom Petty

Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.
Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.

-- Hafiz

Good poetry makes
The universe
Admit a secret:
"I am really just
A tambourine,
Grab hold,
Play me against
Your warm
Thigh."

-- Hafiz

The heart is a
Thousand-stringed instrument

That can only be tuned with
Love.

-- Hafiz

Music heard so deeply
That is not heard at all, but you are
The music
While the music lasts.

-- T. S. Eliot

There is no truer truth obtainable by man than that which comes of music.

-- Robert Browning

Music is the poetry of the air.

-- Jean Paul Richter

Where words fail, music speaks.

-- Hans Christian Andersen

To sing is to pray twice.

-- St. Augustine

Music fills the infinite between two souls.

-- Rabindranath Tagore

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

-- Rabindranath Tagore

Music is the purest form of art . . . therefore true poets, they who are seers, seek to express the universe in terms of music . . . The singer has everything within him.  The notes come out from his very life.  They are not materials gathered from outside.

-- Rabidranath Tagore

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician.  I often think in music.  I live my daydreams in music.  I see my life in terms of music . . . I get most joy in life out of music.

-- Albert Einstein

The man who has many answers
is often found
in the theaters of information
where he offers, graciously,
his deep findings.

While the man who has only questions,
to comfort himself, makes music.

-- Mary Oliver

. . . you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

-- Mary Oliver

I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree.  I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible.  I can sit
on the top of the dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned.  I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.

-- Mary Oliver

 . . . The little sparrow
with the pink beak
calls out, over and over, so simply -- not to me
but to the whole world.  All afternoon
I grow wiser, listening to him,
soft, small, nameless fellow at the top of some weed,
enjoying his life.  If you can sing, do it.  If not,

even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness,
like praise,
from the pool of shade you have found beside the everlasting.

-- Mary Oliver

I believe in kindness.  Also in mischief.  Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

-- Mary Oliver

Lilies -- as tall as ourselves and more lovely,
   and full of fragrance, and long orange tongues,
      and those playthings the bees -- stood in

a neighbor's yard, a thick, ramping
   hedge of them.  You could not help but see
      that to be beautiful is also to be simple

and brief; is to rise up and be glorious, and then vanish;
   is to be silent but as though a song was in you only it
      hasn't yet been heard . . . .

-- Mary Oliver

The moon floats above the pine trees
as you sit on the veranda in the cool evening air.
Your fingertips move lightly along the flute.
The melody is so lovely that it makes the listeners weep.
But wisdom's flute has no holes
and its ancient clear music is beyond emotion.

-- Hsueh-tou (980-1052)

The fact that children make beautiful music is less significant than the fact that music can make beautiful children.

-- Cheryl Lavendar

All of music is an attempt at communication between human hearts and minds; at the very minimum the creator reaches out to and through the performer, and both of them reach out to the listener . . .

-- Robert Shaw

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

This music of heaven is not sound as we understand it.  In it we can find rhythm, melody, harmony, and other aspects typical of music, but it cannot be heard.  This music finds expression in the beauty of nature, the birth and death of stars and galaxies, and the simple dignity of human ideals.

-- Derek Lin

Silence plays for you the song of serenity and the sounds of stillness without speakers or subwoofers, CD players or iPods, microphones or musical instruments.  What is melody after all, but a series of notes framing the space between them?  Perhaps it is as rock star Sting says:  silence may well be the ultimate music.

-- Derek Lin

Unless you believe in divine revelations, what I'm saying will sound like nonsense, but I believe that when God created the world, he created everything, so music is something that already exists.  You just have to be very still and hear it.  Plato believed that was the case.  I'm not being over-pious if I say to God 'Guide me, help me.'  It's a kind of prayer, so therefore writing music is a kind of prayer.

-- Sir John Tavener