Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Mikhail Glinka, fully Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka

A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.

Music | Wisdom |

James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield

It is one of the many paradoxes of psychology that the pursuit of happiness defeats its own purpose. We find happiness only when we do not directly seek it. An analogy will make this clear. In listening to music at a concert, we experience pleasurable feelings only so long as our attention is directed towards the music. But if in order to increase our happiness we give all our attention to our subjective feeling of happiness, it vanishes. Nature contrives to make it impossible for anyone to attain happiness by turning into himself.

Attention | Experience | Feelings | Listening | Music | Nature | Order | Psychology | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |

Heinrich Heine

The essence of music is revelation... There is something marvelous in music. I might almost say it is, in itself, a marvel. Its position is somewhere between the region of thought and that of a phenomena; a glimmering medium between mind and matter, related to both and yet differing from either. Spiritual, and yet requiring rhythm; material, and yet independent of space... It is spirit, yet in need of time, rhythm; it is matter, yet independent of space.

Mind | Music | Need | Phenomena | Position | Revelation | Space | Spirit | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Thought |

Jascha Heifetz

Music is for the betterment and enrichment of the individual, just as education and reading are. When people come together to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken its longest stride forward since the beginning of time. Music is something to live with always, and children should be taught to regard it as a close and inalienable friend.

Beginning | Children | Civilization | Education | Friend | Individual | Music | People | Play | Reading | Regard | Time | Will | Wisdom |

Hugh Reginald Haweis

Although music appeals simply to the emotions, and represents no definite images in itself, we are justified in using any language which may serve to convey to others our musical expressions. Words will often pave the way for the more subtle operations of music, and unlock the treasures which sound alone an rifle, and hence the eternal popularity of song.

Emotions | Eternal | Language | Music | Popularity | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Words |

John Hallock

I've noticed two things about men who get big salaries. They are almost invariably men who, in conversation or in conference, are adaptable. They quickly get the other fellow's view. They are more eager to do this than to express their own ideas. Also, they state their own point of view convincingly.

Conversation | Ideas | Men | Wisdom |

Jamake Highwater

The Indian... sees his music as indistinct from his dancing and his dancing as indistinct from his worship and his worship as indistinct from his living.

Music | Wisdom | Worship |

David Hume

Among well-bred people a mutual deference is affected, contempt of others is disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority.

Attention | Authority | Contempt | Conversation | Deference | People | Superiority | Vehemence | Wisdom |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

The silence in our lives is under assault on all fronts: roaring jets and blasting Walkmans, numbing elevator music and blaring headline news. It’s hard to genuflect to the beat of MTV. We are wired, plugged in, constantly catered to and cajoled. After a while we become terrified out of the silence, unaware of what it has to offer. We drown out the simple question of God with the simplistic sound-bites of man.

God | Man | Music | News | Question | Silence | Sound | Wisdom | God |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes in our hearts.

Music | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Roger Imhoff

Where there is no concern in the heart, there comes no music from the soul.

Heart | Music | Soul | Wisdom |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Meditation is like a river. It cannot be tamed. It flows and flows and overflows its banks. It is music without sound. It is the silence in which the observer ceases to be immediately he plunges in.

Meditation | Music | Silence | Sound | Wisdom |

Jeannette Kirk

It can be said without qualification that music expresses all the various shadings of life's moods and the greatest portion of life's experiences. There is perhaps no more adequate tool than music to relate mankind to life.

Life | Life | Mankind | Music | Wisdom |

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

We love music for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch.

Feelings | Love | Music | Wisdom |

Charles Lamb

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sound of bells (bells the music highest bordering upon heaven), most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never heard it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelve-month. All I have done or suffered, performed or neglected - in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight of a contemporary, when he exclaimed: “I saw the skirts of the departing year.” It is no more than what is sober sadness, every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking.

Heaven | Indifference | Mind | Music | Past | Sadness | Sound | Time | Wisdom | Worth | Old |

Claude Levi-Strauss

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

Character | Language | Means | Music | Wisdom |