Meditations on the Muse

While spending a few days this week with Kerry Livgren, who has to be one of the most musical people I have ever been blessed to know, I have pondered the gift that is music. Here are various thoughts on the same from others. Let me know which ones resonate with you…


A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach

Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~Gustav Mahler

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ~Maya Angelou

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli

Music is what feelings sound like. ~Author Unknown

If I ever die of a heart attack, I hope it will be from playing my stereo too loud. ~Anonymous

There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres. ~Lord Byron

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not

shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. ~Henri Rabaud

Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter

There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is. ~William P. Merrill

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. ~William F. Buckley, Jr.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. ~Robert Fripp

Music's the medicine of the mind. ~John A. Logan

Music is the universal language of mankind. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. ~Buffy Sainte-Marie

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine

When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine

Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green

Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius

Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de LaPrade

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin

Thoughts?