Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

John Sullivan Dwight

Every genuine strain of music is a serene prayer, or bold, inspired demand, to be united with all, at the Heart of things.

Heart | Music | Prayer |

Max Ehrmann

After the day’s struggle there is no freedom like unfettered thoughts, no sound like the music of silence. And though behind you lies a road of dust and heat and discouragement, and before you the challenge and uncertainty of untried paths, in this brief hour you are master of all highways, and the universe nestles in your soul.

Challenge | Day | Freedom | Music | Silence | Soul | Sound | Struggle | Uncertainty | Universe |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Character | Life | Life | Music | Nature | Poetry | Rule | Loss |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

The music of life is in danger of being lost in the music of the voice.

Danger | Life | Life | Music | Danger |

Os Guiness

Are you leading an examined life? Or are you living in the hand-me-down ideas of others? Do you pick up the music coming from dimensions beyond the here and now? Or are you one of those who just don’t get it? Let your mind and your heart run deep. Come, join the seeker’s path on the long journey home.

Heart | Ideas | Journey | Life | Life | Mind | Music |

Ahmet Haşim

The poet’s language is constructed not for the purpose of being understood but to be heard; it is an intermediary language between music and words, yet close to music than to words.

Language | Music | Purpose | Purpose | Words |

James M. Gillis

Art is revelation. If painting shows only what is there, it is not art. Art like fine music or high literature must carry the beholder beyond this world and all that appears in it, transport him to the shores of the eternal world and enable him to see and hear the things not given to the tongue of man to utter.

Art | Eternal | Literature | Man | Music | Revelation | World | Art |

Katharine Hepburn, fully Katharine Houghton Hepburn

You can’t change the music of your soul.

Change | Music | Soul |

Allan J Hamilton

Listen to your favorite music. I’m a big advocate of letting patients listen to music through headphones while they are asleep during surgery. It’s been reported they wake up more clearheaded and calm than other patients

Music |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The spirituality that flows from our actions is not fleeting, transient, or solitary in a silent cosmos. The music of refined actions, the melody of a noble soul, is woven into the tapestry of eternal music which God Himself composed.

Eternal | God | Melody | Music | Soul | Spirituality | God |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Does music make plants grow, or are there among the plans some that are musical?

Music |

Vincent McNabb

Inspiration presupposes revelation. Inspiration may be called the guardian of revelation.

Inspiration | Revelation |

Thomas Merton

The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Despair | Joy | Life | Life | Music | Phenomena | Reality | Sadness | Silence |

Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman

Our beliefs serve myriad purposes: They help us to organize the world in meaningful ways… They can also connect us with the transcendent dimensions of experience, and give us inspiration and hope, essential tools for confronting those moments of confusion and doubt that are so often part of life.

Doubt | Experience | Hope | Inspiration | Life | Life | World |

Francis Quarles

The voice of humility is God’s music and the silence of humility is God’s rhetoric.

God | Humility | Music | Rhetoric | Silence |

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Is not music the food of love?

Love | Music |

Thomas De Witt Talmage

Among the first things created was the bird. Why? Because God wanted the world to have music at the start.

God | Music | World | God |

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

All about me may be silence and darkness, yet within me, in the spirit, is music and brightness, and color flashes through all my thoughts.

Darkness | Music | Silence | Spirit |

Aaron Copland

If you want to understand music better, you can do nothing more important than to listen to it.

Better | Important | Music | Nothing | Understand |