The Link To Nature:

Jean Paul
Music is the only one of the fine arts in which not only man, but all other animals, have a common property.

[This is true: birds like it, and cats and cattle seem to like it]

The View Of Players:

Artur Schnabel
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah that is where the art resides!

Zabach
A musical talent is like having six fingers on one hand. You're born with it, you're different because of it, you can't do a thing about it except put it to use.

Bach
The sole end and aim of all music should be nothing else but (God's glory and) pleasant recreation.

The Philosophy Of Music:

Plato
Music is to the mind as air to the body

Schopenhauer
Music is a shower bath of the soul, washing away all that is impure.

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

Nietsche
Without music life would be a mistake.

Longfellow
Music is the universal language of mankind.

Shakespeare
The man that hath no music in himself
Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds
Is fit for treasons, strategems and spoils

Cervantes
There can be no mischief sure when there is music

Beethoven
Music should strike fire from the heart of a man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.

Billings
Music wasn't made to make us wise, but better natured.

[This of course echoes Luther, above]

Mariah Carey
A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Conroy
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
[Yes, then you have to turn to card games: see below]

Merrill
If you think you've hit a false note sing loud. When in doubt, sing loud.
[Robert Merrill was a famous opera singer]

Einstein
This world may consist of musical notes as well as of mathematical rules.

Goethe
Music fills up the present moment more decisively than anything else, whether it awakens thought or summons to action.

Heine
When words leave off, music begins.

Heifetz
When people come to play music as they come to play bridge, civilisation will have taken the longest stride forward since the beginning of time.

[My great-grandfather, travelling on business, once happened to play cards with Jascha Heifetz on a train in the middle of a desert; well, there wasn't anything else to do, and it wasn't bridge. So his integrity is intact!]

The Divine View Of Music?:

Luther
I am not satisfied with any man who despises music, for music is a gift of God.
Music makes more people milder and gentler, more moral and reasonable.

Merz
The power of music is so great that in all the legends of all nations, the invention of the art is ascribed to the gods.

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

The Love Experience:

Horace
Music is an incitement to love.

Stendhal
The habit of listening to music and of dreaming about it predisposes one to love.

Shakespeare
If music be the food of love, play on

The Link To Dance:

Pound
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance.

Keith Richards
I always try to imagine people dancing or moving to the music when I'm writing a song.

Parry
In fact, dance rhythm may be surely asserted to have been the immediate origin of all instrumental music.

Composers speak:

Bartok
Competitions are for horses not artists.

Louis Armstrong
All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

Tchaikovsky
I played over the music of that scroundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard.

Wagner
Women are the music of life.

Debussy
The idea of marketing a musical composition like a tub of lard or a barrel of beer is to me as sad as it is ridiculous.

Puccini on Toscanini
When that fellow gets a score into his hands, he digs into it like a miner in order to explore every corner.