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

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would have thus been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Character | Life | Life | Music | Nature | Poetry | Rule | Wisdom | Loss |

Nathanael Emmons, also Nathaniel Emmons

The highest graces of music flow from the feelings of the heart.

Feelings | Heart | Music | Wisdom |

Henry Havelock Ellis

The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.

Music | Prayer | Wisdom |

Nathaniel Emmons

The highest graces of music flow from the feelings of the heart.

Feelings | Heart | Music | Wisdom |

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 |

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 |

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 |