This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments: even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression." - Lewis Mumford
"We are a spectacular manifestation of life. We have language... We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a "common goal" of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music." - Lewis Thomas
"The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music." - Lewis Thomas
"Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"One of the commonest mistakes and one of the costliest thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic - something or other which we do not possess. Success is generally due to holding one, and failure to letting go. You decide to learn a language, study music, take a course of reading, train yourself physically. Will it be success or failure? It depends upon how much pluck and perseverance that word “decide” contains. The decision that nothing can overrule, the grip that nothing can detach will bring success." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist - this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul - a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know." - Margaret Mead
"Music is the art of the prophets, the only art that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us." - Martin Luther
"The genius of life is its variety. If you played one note and kept playing it all of the time, you’d go nuts. It’s the blending of the different notes that make the music." - Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
"Mere knowledge alone will not enable us to solve the profound problems of life... Sympathy is an essential part of a right attitude to the riddles of the universe. You must tune up your heart to catch the music of the spheres." - Morris Raphael Cohen
"Most people will go to their graves with their music still in them." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"He gave man speech, and speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe; and science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind poured itself forth in all-prophetic song; and music lifted up the listening spirit until it walked, except from mortal care, Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"When a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs... and his whole life is passed in warbling and the delights of song, in the first stage of the process the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful, instead of brittle and useless. But, if he carries on the softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his soul." - Plato NULL
"Education has two branches - one of gymnastic, which is concerned with the body, and the other of music, which is designed for the improvement of the soul. And gymnastic has also two branches - dancing and wrestling; and one sort of dancing imitates muscial recitation, and aims at preserving dignity and freedom, the other aims at producing health, agility, and beauty in the limbs and parts of the body, giving the proper flexion and extension to each of them, a harmonious motion being diffused everywhere, and forming suitabile accompaniment to the dance." - Plato NULL
"Education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul." - Plato NULL
"Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease, and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord; and the supreme arts of temperance, of justice, and of wisdom, as they are acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its inexperience of evil, and whose utter name is, by their award, simpleness and ignorance of what all men who live aright should know." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his days, and spoil for him his proper work." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The music that can deepest reach, cure all ill, is conceal speech." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Most men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are must luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience have been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Aspiration shows us the goal and the distance to it; inspiration encourages with a view to how far we have come. Aspiration gives us the map of the journey; inspiration furnishes the music to keep us marching." - Ralph Washington Sockman
"Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once." - Robert Browning
"Music is a tonic for the saddened soul, a Roaring Meg [cannon] against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul." - Robert Burton
"Music is love in search of a word." - Sidney Lanier
"We are music while the music lasts." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"Music is a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that." - Thomas Carlyle
"See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it." - Thomas Carlyle
"Give us, oh, give us, the man who sings at his work! He will do more in the same time, he will do it better, he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation in its powers of endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly joyous, a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright." - Thomas Carlyle
"It is the spirit which knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"How sour sweet music is, when time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives, and here have I the daintiness of ear to check time broke in a disordered string; but for the concord of my state and time had not an ear to hear my true time broke. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; for now hath Time made me his numbering clock. My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, whereto my finger, like a dial's point, is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart, which is the bell. Richard II, Act v, Scene 5" - William Shakespeare
"There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolstering the rule of the upper classes. Only Beethoven was a forerunner of the revolutionary movement. If you read his letters, you will see how often he wrote to his friends that he wished to give new ideas to the public and rouse it to revolt against its masters." - Dmitri Shostakovich, fully Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich
"Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment. " - Dmitri Shostakovich, fully Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich
" Worship is the soul searching for its counterpart. It is a thirsty land crying out for rain. It is a candle in the act of being kindled. It is a drop in quest of the ocean. It is a man listening through a tornado for a Still Small Voice. It is the voice in the night calling for help. It is a sheep lost in the wilderness, pleading for rescue by the Good Shepherd. It is the same sheep nestling in the arms of the Rescuer. It is the Prodigal Son running to his Father. It is a soul standing in awe before the mystery of the Universe. It is a poet enthralled by the beauty of a sunrise. It is a workman pausing for a moment to listen to a strain of music. It is a hungry heart seeking for love. It is Time flowing into Eternity… It is man climbing the altar stairs to God." - Dwight Bradley
"Life is inherent in cosmic forces, and as we live and think, so the Universe responds to us. This is prayer, with our life fields or auras carrying an electrical charge to attract negative ions to us and be more stimulated. In this way our life fields remain positively charged and attract the negative particles or ions. This is the secret of life. Retaining communication and unity with the Universe ... our Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy … which is energy in harmonic interaction with neighboring galaxies and galaxies beyond into inter-galactic space … ad infinitum … where wave patterns create harmonic chords that can be read like a score of music … and the illusion of matter strung together with electromagnetic and nuclear forces of light." - Elizabeth Klarer
"Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond; too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition; for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-glory:where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life." - Evelyn Underhill
"There is but one quality necessary for the perfect understanding of character, one quality that, if man have it, he may dare to judge—that is, omniscience. Most people study character as a proofreader pores over a great poem: his ears are dulled to the majesty and music of the lines, his eyes are darkened to the magic imagination of the genius of the author; that proofreader is busy watching for an inverted comma, a misspacing, or a wrong font letter. He has an eye trained for the imperfections, the weaknesses." - William George Jordan
"I`m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it`s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It`s not just an art form; it`s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It`s my way of telling a story." - Federico Fellini
"Though everything else may appear shallow and repulsive, even the smallest task in music is so absorbing, and carries us so far away from town, country, earth, and all worldly things, that it is truly a blessed gift of God." - Felix Mendelssohn, fully Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best." - Frank Zappa, born Frank Vincent Zappa
"Yes, death is strong, but look you, the strongest, Stronger is music than death." - Franz Werfel, fully Franz Viktor Werfel
"Love is a command, not just a feeling. Somehow, in the romantic world of music and theater we have made love to be what it is not. We have so mixed it with beauty and charm and sensuality and contact that we have robbed it of its higher call of cherishing and nurturing." - Ravi Zacharias, fully Frederick Antony Ravi Kumar Zacharias
"Kind words are the music of the world. They have power which seems to be beyond natural causes, as if they were some angel's song which had lost its way and come on earth." - Frederick William Faber
"In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain. " - George Szell, originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell
"We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself." - Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
"No one can possibly simulate you or me with a system that is less complex than you or me. The products that we produce may be viewed as a simulation, and while products can endure in ways that our bodies cannot, they can never capture the richness, complexity, or depth of purpose of their creator. Beethoven once remarked that the music he had written was nothing compared with the music he had heard." - Heinz Pagels