“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many… music is even more – it can provide access even when no medicine can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.” – Oliver Sacks
*
All I insist on, and nothing else, is that you should show the whole world that you are not afraid. Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak — and speak in such a way that people will remember it.” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
*
“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.” – Michel de Montaigne
*
“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.” – Henry David Thoreau
*
“In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.” – Vincent Van Gogh
*
“It’s impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
*
“Music… gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” – Plato
*
“I must have something to do — usually musical ideas are pursuing me, to the point of torture, I cannot escape them, they stand like walls before me. If it’s an allegro that pursues me, my pulse keeps beating faster, I can get no sleep. If it’s an adagio, then I notice my pulse beating slowly. My imagination plays on me as if I were a clavier. Haydn smiled, the blood rushed to his face, and he said: I am really just a living clavier.” – Joseph Haydn
*
“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.” – Kurt Vonnegut
*
“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” – Khalil Gibran
*
“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
*
“Music is the shorthand of emotion.” – Leo Tolstoy
*
“One must learn to love. This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity: finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
*
“The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.” – Oliver Sacks
*
“Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.” – Helen Keller
*
“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain … Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
*
“Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.” – Joseph Campbell
*
“Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.” – Alan Watts
*
“What I have in my heart and soul – must find a way out. That’s the reason for music.” – Ludwig van Beethoven
*
“He knew that the very memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void.” – Marcel Proust
*
“Deeply listening to music opens up new avenues of research I’d never even dreamed of. I feel from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis.” – Carl Jung
*
“Continue making music, producing records, and erring on the side of benevolence and beauty whenever possible.” – Chris Walla
The Far Mountains 