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Word Gems
What is a man but the sum of his thoughts?

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Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.

                                                    Edgar Yipsel Harburg

Personal Statement #28: Love In The AfterLife: The Perfect Storm of Ultimate Human Suffering: Exploring Cosmic Meaning in Separation from a Soulmate Lover: Making Your Music Pure

Unknown: "Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside of us."

Red Auerbach: "Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Joseph Addison: "Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below."

Henry Giles: "A song will outlive all sermons in the memory."

Elvis Presley: "I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to."

M. Aumonier: "There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it."

Anais Nin: "Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."

I got rhythm, I got music, I got my girl, who could ask for anything more!

Lead vocalist, Bob Miranda, of "The Happenings" performing on the Smothers Brothers Show (1967) a superbly jazzed-up version of George Gershwin's old song, "I Got Rhythm"!

In this vast and troubled world We sometimes loose our way But I am never lost I feel this way because I got rhythm I got music I got my girl Who could ask for anything more I got good times No more bad times I got my girl Who could ask for anything more Old man trouble I don't mind him You won't find him 'Round my door I got starlight I got sweet dreams I got my girl Who could ask for, Who could ask for more

Yehudi Menuhin: "Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous."

Chet Atkins: "Approach your guitar intelligently, and if there are limits, don't deny them. Work within your restrictions. Somethings you can do better than others, some things you can't do as well. So accentuate the positive... It takes a lot of devotion and work, or maybe I should say play, because if you love it, that's what it amounts to I haven't found any shortcuts, and I've been looking for a long time."

Jean Genet: "Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me."

Lorenzo, The Merchant of Venice: "The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted."

Unknown: "Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul."

Plato: "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything."

Dr. Max Bendiner: "Music may achieve the highest of all missions: She may be a bond between nations, races and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; She may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile."

Beethoven: "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents."

Quote from outside an old opera house: "Bach gave us God's Word. Mozart gave us God's laughter. Beethoven gave us God's fire. God gave us Music that we might pray without words."

Albert Einstein, asked about his theory of relativity: "It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception."

Henry van Dyke: "Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best."

Harlan Howard: "Country music is three chords and the truth."

Bill Nye: "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

Albert Camus: "Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a  Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason."

B.J. Thomas, I Believe In Music: "I believe in music, I believe in love. Music is the universal language and love is the key -- to brotherhood, peace and understanding, living in harmony. So take your brother by the hand and sing along with me..."

Eric Johnson: "I don't even know if I can take credit for writing Cliffs of Dover ... it was just there for me one day ... literally wrote in five minutes ... kind of a gift from a higher place that all of us are eligible for. We just have to listen for it and be available to receive it."

Noel Paul Stookey, songwriter, The Wedding Song (1971) his web site Noel Paul Stookey wrote The Wedding Song for Peter Yarrow's marriage to Marybeth McCarthy, the niece of Senator, and one-time Presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy. Stookey's name is not credited as the songwriter; neither does he receive any royalties - because, he says, after he prayed, he was "given" the song; his only requirement that of allowing "the pencil to move across the page." Stookey says, "Into every songwriter's life comes a song, the source of which cannot be explained by personal experience." The royalties of the song go to a trust fund, Public Domain Foundation, and are distributed to the disadvantaged throughout the world.   Editor's note: I have devoted P.S. #13, 37, and 46 to The Wedding Song, channeled information from the Other Side.

Yo-Yo Ma, cellist: "What I look for in musicians is generosity. There is so much to learn from each other... Great creativity begins with tolerance."

B. H. Haggin: "If you don't understand what Beethoven 'says,' the reason is that the sounds he uses are not a meaningful language for you; and the thing to do is to learn this language as you would any other ... Which is to say that you will have to listen to Beethoven's music, and keep listening ... just as the way to understand a poem is to read it, and the way to understand a painting is to look at it, so the way -- the only way -- to understand a piece of music is to listen to it, and to keep listening."

Isadore (Friz) Freleng, directing more Warner Bros. cartoons than anyone (266), often injected his passion for  music into his work. Probably his greatest toon-musicals were his visualizations of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, an example of which is his 1946 Rhapsody Rabbit (above): Bugs performs a concerto while dealing with the piano's resident mouse.

Eric Anderson: "It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit -- enable them to see visions and dream dreams."

Unknown: "Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us."

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

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

Hans Christian Andersen: "Where words fail, music speaks."

Oscar Hammerstein: "All the sounds of the earth are like music."

Ursula K. Le Guin: "It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music."

Richard Strauss: "I may not be a first-class composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer."

Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, 1962: "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."

Charlie "YardBird" Parker: "Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

Hunter S. Thompson: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

Barney Kessel, jazz guitar: "Playing scales is like a boxer skipping rope or punching a bag. It's not the thing in itself; it's preparatory to the activity."

Ronnie Scott, jazz saxophonist: "Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible."

Slash, Guns'n Roses: "Whenever society gets too stifling and the rules get too complex, there's some sort of musical explosion."

Voltaire: "Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."

Joe (Sach) Satriani: "Guitarists shouldn't get too riled up about all of the great players that were left off of Rolling Stone Magazines' list of the Greatest Guitar Players of all Time ... Rolling Stone is published for people who read the magazine because they don't know what to wear."

Henry Van Dyke: "Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best."

Frederick Deluis: "Music is an outburst of the soul."

Johann Sebastian Bach: "There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."

Brian Setzer, Stray Cats: "Elvis Presleys' first album ... had more energy and more enthusiam than any other album at the time. When it was released it just blew everything else out. It changed the whole landscape of music."

Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong: "I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, 'cause what you're there for is to please the people."

Rory Block, guitarist: "It took me five years of going right into the mouth of the lion to learn to be at ease onstage ... if you deal with an audience as a bunch of people having a great time, you'll have a much bettrer time as a performer."

Billy F. Gibbons, guitar ZZ-Top: "My discussion with Keith Richards about the creative process led me to believe that there's an invisible presence of a stream of ever-flowing creativity that we overhear - all you have to do is pull up the antenna and dial it in. This presence allows you to maintain your sense of origin and move forward."

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

Oscar Wilde: "Music makes one feel so romantic, at least it always gets on one's nerves, which is the same thing nowadays."

Tipper Gore: "You're talking to someone who really understands rock music."

Les Paul: "The guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It's everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It's everything, but it's elusive."

Pietro Mascagni: "Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics."

Samuel Butler: "Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule."

Lenny Breau, jazz guitarist: "I also became inspired by impressionist painters such as Renoir, and wanted to do the same sort of thing with music-portray whatever mood strikes me the way Keith Jarrett does on piano."

Barney Kessel: "He signed his work .. you could always tell when it was Herb Ellis playing."

Bonnie Raitt: "There would be no rock'n roll or rhythm and blues without Leo Fenders' contribution ... the tone is everything."

James Taylor: "I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it and you need them to hear it."

Oscar Lavant, pianist: "There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."

Brian Setzer: "Rock'n roll is the physical thing that just comes out of you .. the other stuff you have to sit down and learn .. once you learn scales and chord progressions, you can make up your own versions." 

Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead: "We have quite a large area, and that makes it more fun for us - certainly more satisfying, because it doesn't restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style. The result, I think, is pretty interesting ... we don't expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top. As long as we can play, we'll play, regardless of what it's for, who it's for or anything. It's fun for us - that's the important thing."

George Harrison: "Barney Kessel is definitely the best guitar player in this world, or any other world."

John Lennon: "Barney Kessel is incredible. He's just amazing. Nobody can play guitar like that."

James Burton, Lead Guitar for Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, EmmyLou Harris, John Denver: "My policy is not how fast you play, it's not how much you play but it's what you play and where you play it ... the word I still use today is called 'simplicity' .. it is so important that you use simplicity in your playing and in your music." 

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

Joe Pass, jazz guitarist: "If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterwards."

Jules Combarieu: "Music is the art of thinking with sounds."

Johnny Cash: "Sam Phillips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use what ever other influences I wanted, but never to copy ... that was a great rare gift he gave me: believe in myself, right from the start of my recording career... if there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field."

Howard Roberts: "I've come up with the theory that the music is within. We don't bring it in; it's already there. We have to figure out how to get it out."

Berthold Auerbach: "Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

Oscar Wilde: "Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory."

John Chesson: "An intellectual is someone who can listen to the 'William Tell Overture' without thinking of the Lone Ranger."

Hugh Masekela, South African trumpet legend: "I think that anybody from the 20th century, up to now, has to be aware that if it wasn't for Louis Armstrong, we'd all be wearing powdered wigs. I think that Louis Armstrong loosened the world, helped people to be able to say 'Yeah,' and to walk with a little dip in their hip. Before Louis Armstrong, the world was definitely square, just like Christopher Columbus thought."

Oscar Hammerstein, working lyric for a piece from The Sound of Music: "Cute little babies that fall out of swings, These are a few of my favourite things."

David Crosby, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: "Neil Young played Helpless, and by the time he finished, we (Crosby, Stills & Nash) were asking him if we could join his band."

Steven Stills, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: "At a beach house in Malibu that the Buffalo Springfield had rented, I set up my big amps, we (Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Bruce Palmer and Steven Stills) ... just went. We played quite literally for twenty straight hours. We must have made up fifty songs, but there was no tape running, no nothing, we just played for the ocean .... and that night I really started to learn how to play lead guitar."

Graham Nash, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: "Wealth and fame can only be so important in the face of musical magic."

Igor Stravinsky: "Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."

Trey Anastasio, Phish: "I feel a great responsibility to deliver for our audience ... I am like their servant, but there's only one honest way to lift people up, which is to feel genuinely elevated yourself. And the way to do that is follow your heart. That's all we try to do."

Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin: "You never knew what was going to happen in concert. It was a really exciting prospect to go onstage, and you can hear that in the live recordings ... wherever we were and whatever year it was, we always went onstage determined to do our best."

Jean Paul Richter: "Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life."

Buddy Holly: "Without Elvis, none of us could have made it."

Jerry Garcia: "Grateful Dead -- that's it!! nobody in the band liked (the name), I didn't like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, 'Yeah, that's great.' It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It's just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don't like it."

Bob Dylan: "When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail."

Sir Thomas Beecham: "There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between."

Pat Conroy: "Without music, life is a journey through a desert." 

T. S. Eliot: "You are the music while the music lasts."

Geoffrey Latham: "Music is the vernacular of the human soul."

Charlie Byrd: "Music takes up where language leaves off. To try and verbalize what music says, emotionally and spiritually, is futile. Let me put it this way, Louis Armstrong once said if you've got to ask, you'll never know."

Brian Setzer: "So much of what we do now started in 1954 at Sun Records in Memphis Tennessee ... those guys were inventing (Rock & Roll) ... you can really tell on some tracks ... they were actually afraid at times of what they were playing. But Rock & Roll definitely didn't come before that time; it started right there."

Igor Stravinsky: "A good composer does not imitate; he steals."

Jeffrey Tate: "The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet."

Katie Greenwood: "Music isn't just learning notes and playing them, you learn notes to play to the music of your soul."

George Eliot: "There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music."

George Jellinek: "The history of a people is found in its songs."

Bill Medley: "My daughter McKenna thought I sang with the Everly Brothers. I said, 'no I was one of the Righteous Brothers' and she said, 'didn't they invent the airplane?'"

Paul McCartney: "George Harrison and John Lennon were the ones most against touring ... I'd been trying to say ..Ah, touring's good and it keeps us sharp .. but finally I agreed with them."

Truman Capote: "Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."

Bob Dylan: "People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties."

Leo Tolstoy: "Music is the shorthand of emotion."

Miles Davis: "I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands."

Confucius: "Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without."

June Masters Bacher: "Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever."

John Lennon: "Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." 

Dr. Max Bendiner: "Music may achieve the highest of all missions: She may be a bond between nations, races and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; She may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile." 

Eric Clapton: "Whatever your standing in life, the most important thing is behaving in ways that help other people. It's the same with music. I am a servant of the music ... and if I get caught up in ego, I'll lose everything ... it'll burn and that's a guarantee."

George Martin: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a musical fragmentation grenade, exploding with a force that is still being felt. It changed the entire nature of the recording game - for keeps."

Sam Phillips: "The greats ... be it of country, rhythm & blues, rock 'n' roll, you know what they were doing ? They were messing with your heart and soul. That's what it was. Nothing has the strength, the power, of music."

10-31-10: Editor's note : Recently, an acquaintance wrote to me and asked if I had yet found a church to attend in this new city to which I’ve moved. I mentally sighed at such enquiry. I politely deflected, indicating that I had not. What I really wanted to say was… attending church, listening to someone talk about Divinity, engaging in a ritualistic observance, and thereby proclaiming, especially to oneself, that one has found God, would be like attending a marriage, or attending a romance, listening to someone merely talk about Twin-Soul ecstasies, that mystic bond of One Person, but then asserting that one had known true love. Or maybe this analogy will make sense to you… Exalting form over substance is like going into a nice restaurant only to read the menu, listening to the waiter extol the wonders of the cuisine… but never actually tasting the chocolate soufflé. There is a line in Leonard’s lyrics: Well, I heard there was a secret chord, That David played and it pleased the Lord, But you don't really care for music, do you? Leonard, speaking to his immature lover, does not mean that she does not enjoy a good tune. He is speaking of music, those mesmerizing frequencies, as that doorway to elevated consciousness; that expedited trip to the foothills of heaven itself. There was a time in my life, for some decades, when I could not listen to music; not because I didn't like the tunes, but because  they threatened to reveal too much. She, too, does not allow music to free her soul in the manner it was meant to do. Music will instruct, will roll back the heavens of one's past life, offering insight and hidden meaning, as can few pedagogues; but she is not willing to be thus mystically taught. Despite the liberty of spirit which music encourages, she merely attends music as she might attend church; as she attends her relationship with Leonard. Music, like romance, and spirituality, is not meant to be a spectator sport, no mere academic endeavor or obligation to be satisfied, but a catalyst for the unfoldment of the inner person... not just to be dutifully visited or attended... but, to be lived in, inhabited, entered into, as the permanent dwelling place, the true sweet home, of one's soul.

See more discussion of the nature of Twin Soul love in my article, Personal Statement #46: Love In The AfterLife: Romance at the Pinnacle of Existence! The Ultimate Dualistic-Halves of Eternal Twin-Soul Love! Why Your Deepest Yearning is the Voice of the Universe Proclaiming Its Truest Cosmic Message! "I will love no other! no other!" 

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

Ludwig van Beethoven: “Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.”

Bix Beiderbecke: “One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Thomas Carlyle: “Music is well said to be the speech of angels.”

Jean Cocteau: “Art is science made clear.”

Ornette Coleman: “Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.”

Lawrence Durrell: “Music is only love looking for words.”

Albert Einstein: “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

John Erskine: “Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.”

Michael Hedges: “I play the guitar because it lets me dream out loud.”

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

Charles Mingus: “In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am.”

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