Any serious literary artist envies music, which has an apparently self-referring language, cannot preach or inform, and totally identifies form and content.

Anthony Burgess, This Man and Music

Great idea!

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Nietzsche

"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music."
— Albert Einstein

"I just can't listen to any more Wagner, you know...I'm starting to get the urge to conquer Poland. "
— Woody Allen

"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


"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
— Aldous Huxley

Or:-

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent"
— Victor Hugo

(Food for thought for the Wittgenstinians? Perhaps that of which we cannot speak we can express in music.)

And, of course:-

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away. "
— Henry David Thoreau

"Music gives soul to the universe
wings to the mind
flight to the imagination
and life to everything"
— Plato

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

Happy are they that go to bed with grave music.

Sir Thomas Browne

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Albert Schweitzer

"[Music:] always makes me feel as if I wanted something."

--Carrie, from Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

I venture to credit myself with truly new music which, being based on tradition, is destined to become tradition.

Schoenberg

"The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul" ~ Ludwig van Beethoven

"Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman." ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side—there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.

Gilles Deleuze