Vernacular
Quotes about the language of music

“Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.”
E.Y. Harburg

“Music is more logical than the human mind can comprehend: yet we can recognize it and surrender to it. We cannot comprehend music but music can comprehend us.”
Peter Hiett

"It’s such an extraordinary thing, music. It is how we speak to God finally – or how we don’t. Even if we’re ignoring God. It’s the language of the spirit. If you believe that we contain within our skin and bones a spirit that might last longer than your time breathing in and out – if there is a spirit, music is the thing that wakes it up. And it certainly woke up mine. And it seems to be how we communicate on another level."
Bono

“Music isn't just learning notes and playing them. You learn notes to play to the music of your soul.”
Katie Greenwood

“Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.”
Yo Yo Ma

“Music is the shorthand of emotion”
Leo Tolstoy

“Music is a fair and glorious gift from God. I am strongly persuaded that after theology there is no art than can be placed on a level with music; for besides theology, music is the only art capable of affording peace and joy of the heart.”
Martin Luther

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music”
Aldous Huxley

“Music is the vernacular of the human soul”
Geoffrey Latham

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

“We need music to restore the human spirit”
Leonard Slatkin
Director of the National Symphony

"Music is so important. It changes thinking, it influences everybody, whether they know it or not. Music knows no boundary lines."
Irving Berlin

"Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable."
Martin Luther

“I think music in itself is healing. It’s an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we’re from, everybody loves music.”
Billy Joel

“Music has the power to move a person between different realities: from a broken body into a soaring spirit, from a broken heart into the connection of shared love, from death into the memory and movement of life. Music has the power to touch the heart of a child with God."
Dr. Deforia Lane
Music Therapist

“Without music, life itself would be an error. The Germans imagine even God singing songs.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

“Music is an outburst of the soul”
Frederick Deluis

“Music is God’s best gift to man; the only art of heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to heaven”
Walter Savage Lander

“It is only that which cannot be expressed otherwise that is worth expressing in music”
Annonymous

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything; It is the essence of order and lends to all that is good, just, and beautiful.”
Plato

“Responsiveness to music is an essential part of our neural nature”
Dr. Oliver Sacks, Neurologist NYC

“Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below”
John Addison

“The only universal tongue”
Samuel Rogers

"My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary."
Martin Luther

“All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music”
Ibid. The School of Giorgione

“Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak”
William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697)

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”
Berthold Auerbach

“We are a spectacular manifestation of life. We have language…we have affection. We have genes for usefulness and usefulness is about as close to a ‘common goal’ of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.”
The Medusa and The Snail (1979)

“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

“I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.”
H. A. Overstreet

“Without music, life is a journey through a desert”
Pat Conroy

“Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near the infinite.”
Thomas Carlyle

“Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind”
Hal A. Lingerman

“Give me the making of the songs of a nation, and I care not who writes its laws.”
Andrew Fletcher

The Taliban banned music in Afghanistan during their rule