“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation...  should be nothing without the form...  that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees....  It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other”- Walter Pater, in ‘The School of Giorgione’; from The Renaissance: Studies in Art & Poetry, 1877

 

“Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure” – E.M. Cioran

 

“Music is probably the most difficult of the arts to criticize" - Winton Dean from "Criticism",  New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980  

 

"Music alone has the power to evoke as it will the improbable places, the unquestionable and chimerical world which works secretly on the mysterious poetry of the night, on the thousand anonymous sounds made when leaves are caressed by the rays of the moon."- Debussy

 

“My music is best understood by children and animals” - Stravinsky

 

 “From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music” – Aldous Huxley, “The Rest Is Silence” from Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931

 

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent” – Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, 1864

 

 “Words are bound in chains, but, happily, sounds are still free” —Ludwig van Beethoven, 1826, writing to the poet Christoph Kuffner.