All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!

-- Thomas Carlyle

Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.

Maya Angelou

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life:  music and cats.

-- Albert Schweitzer

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings.  To get in touch with that wholeness.

-- Corita Kent

You have to take a deep breath and allow the music to flow through you.  Revel in it, allow yourself to awe.  When you play allow the music to break your heart with its beauty.

Kelly White

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.

-- Edward Elgar

I love the relationship that anyone has with music . . . because there's something in us that's beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out.  It's the best part of us probably.

Nick Hornby

When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

-- Alan Watts

Music is a language that doesn't speak in particular words.  It speaks in emotions, and if it's in the bones, it's in the bones.

-- Keith Richards

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

-- Bruce Springsteen

I had accepted the idea that the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making one susceptible to divine influences.

-- John Cage

The experience of transcending the ego and losing the self in music extends to the listener as well as the creator.  Composers and artists have the power to transport the listener to ecstatic states that many have described as an experience of union of the self with a higher power.

-- Richard Wolf

We often think of silence as an absence of sound, but silence is the presence of nonsound that incubates the potentialities of sound.  We think of stillness as an absence of movement, but it is actually the presence of the ground of being.  We think of peace as the absence of conflict, but it is the presence of a pure and pleasing calm: a relaxed and liberated awareness.

-- Richard Wolf

Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

-- Leonard Bernstein

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.

-- Robert Browning

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

-- Martin Luther

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

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Music comes from a place we don't know.

-- Chris Martin

Where words fail, music speaks.

-- Hans Christian Andersen

If I cannot fly, let me sing.

-- Stephen Sondheim

Music is an outburst of the soul.

-- Frederick Delius

Music can be a bridge between body and mind, the primitive and refined, the material and immaterial.  And it can also be a bridge to a more expansive awareness and a more harmonious way of life.

-- Richard Wolf

I am

a hole in a flute

that the Christ's breath moves through --

listen to this

music.

Hafiz/Ladinsky

I think when choral music is done at its highest level, when we eliminate all of the things that will distract the human mind and ear and enable people to hear the full beauty of the music and power of that text, it can become an inspiration for people to live live that are full of more happiness, more hope, and more love.

-- Anton Armstrong

I hope the people who have heard our music were touched and, if we really did our jobs well, left as transformed human beings -- a bit kinder, gentler, and with more hope in their lives to address the challenges that they're facing.

-- Anton Armstrong

The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.

-- Sir Thomas Beecham

Every heart sings a song incomplete, until another heart whispers back.  Those who wish to sing always find a song.

-- Plato

When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.

-- Rumi

The Earth has music for those who listen.

-- George Santayana

Music in the Soul can be heard by the Universe.

-- Lao Tzu

God sends each person into this world with a special message to deliver, with a special song to sing, with a special act of love to bestow.

-- John Powell

The art of life is to make another Soul vibrate with a song of Joy.

-- Edwin Leibfreed

Music is the vernacular of the human Soul.

-- Geoffrey Latham

Music without words means leaving behind the mind.  And leaving behind music is meditation.  And the source of all is sound.

-- Kabir

And your body is the harp of your Soul, and it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it, or confused sounds.

-- Kahlil Gibran

Music is well said to be the speech of Angels, in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so Divine.  It brings us near to the infinite.

-- Thomas Carlyle

Art and music are two of the most powerful healing forces in the Universe.

-- Rosanne Cash

Music can change the world because it can change people.

-- Bono

Of all the music that reached farthest into Heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

-- Henry Ward Beecher

Music is a therapy; it is good for those who write it, those who study it, those who direct it, those who perform it, and finally those who listen to it.  If everyone sang in a choir or played in an orchestra, perhaps the world would be a more enjoyable and harmonious place to live in.

-- Ivo Antognini

I am conviced that by listening to music we can reach a level of feeling where the spirit rises as in no other circumstance.

-- Ivo Antognini

We must be able to show that MUSIC, the divine art, is more than the mere search of formal perfection and interpretative beauty, music should serve to extol the values of solidarity, peace, and understanding.  We cannot work isolated, we have to make all possible efforts to have our voices heard and to let music work its own paths of communication.

-- opening statement of World Choral Day, 1990

It is time to show, with more power and strength, that our choral family contributes, through music, to break down the artificial barriers product of politics, different ideologies, religious differences, and racial hatred that separate human beings.

-- opening statement from World Choral Day, 1990

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart . . .

-- Pablo Casals

Music can change the world because it can change people.

-- Bono

If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.

-- Mark Helprin

Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.

-- Johann Sebastian Bach

Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.

-- Maria von Trapp

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human.  Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

-- Douglas Adams

Music is the great uniter.  An incredible force.  Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.

-- Sarah Dessen

Music . . . will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The way that the world is going, we're going to need more musicians.  Music and the arts are the most healing things in the world.

-- Dan DeLuca