This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The costliest thing on earth is the drunkard’s song. It costs ruin of body. It costs ruin of mind...The costliest thing on earth is sin. The most expensive of all music is the Song of the Drunkards. It is the highest tariff of nations - not a protective tariff, but a tariff of doom, a tariff of woe, an tariff of death.
Body | Death | Earth | Mind | Music | Nations | Sin | Wisdom | Woe |
Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich
Music is, but its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all... music expresses itself.
Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.
Appreciation | Love | Music | People | Respect | Wisdom | Appreciation | Respect | Trouble |
It is not the eye, that sees the beauty of the heaven, nor the ear, that hears the sweetness of music or the glad tidings of a prosperous accident, but the soul, that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections; and the more noble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savory are its perceptions.
Accident | Beauty | Heaven | Music | Soul | Wisdom | Beauty |
The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets.
Childhood | Children | Labor | Men | Nature | Passion | Play | Poetry | Sense | Wisdom | World |
There is poetry and there is beauty in real sympathy; but there is more - there is action. The noblest and most powerful form of sympathy is not merely the responsive tear, the echoed sigh, the answering look; it is the embodiment of the sentiment of actual help.
Action | Beauty | Poetry | Sentiment | Sympathy | Wisdom | Beauty |
I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
Despise | Music | Philosophy | Revelation | Wisdom | World |
In its purest form music is not a representational but rather a nonobjective, nonverbal world, it is a world of its own, almost a creatio ex hihilo, an occasion for immediacy of experience, a nonreducible mode of beauty, of contrast and resolution, of order and ecstasy flowing through and beyond the order. Order, and ecstasy rooted in order: that sounds like the relation between law and love, law and gospel.
Beauty | Contrast | Ecstasy | Experience | Law | Love | Music | Order | Resolution | World |
Whenever the hidden, the unfathomable, is experienced whenever the meaning of all things is felt and grasped, then it is ether the devoutness of silence, that most intimate feeling of the living God, that deepest force of religious intuition and emotion, which takes hold of man, or, again, it is the uplift to imagery which is stirred up within him, the poetry which sings in prayer of the ineffable.
Force | God | Intuition | Man | Meaning | Poetry | Prayer | Silence |
For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. 'You are finite,' time tells you in a voice of boredom, 'and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.' As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.
Better | Illusion | Language | Lesson | Life | Life | Music | Sense | Teach | Time |
Every genuine strain of music is a serene prayer, or bold, inspired demand, to be united with all, at the Heart of things.
After the day’s struggle there is no freedom like unfettered thoughts, no sound like the music of silence. And though behind you lies a road of dust and heat and discouragement, and before you the challenge and uncertainty of untried paths, in this brief hour you are master of all highways, and the universe nestles in your soul.
Challenge | Day | Freedom | Music | Silence | Soul | Sound | Struggle | Uncertainty | Universe |