"The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge." - Cleveland Amory

"No opera plot can be sensible, for in sensible situations people do not sing." - W. H. Auden, in Time

"Tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes." - Beethoven

"The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. . . . Bodies never lie." - Agnes de Mille, in New York Times Magazine

"Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong." - Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe

"Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you." - Milne, A[lan] A[lexander] (1882-1956) spoken by Winnie-the-Pooh

"Architecture is music in stone." - Rand, Ayn

"Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heaven we have below."
- JOSEPH ADDISON, Song for St. Cecilia's Day

"Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense." - JOSEPH ADDISON, The Spectator

"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy." - LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, quoted in A.W. Thayer's Life of Beethoven

"Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,
'To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak."
- WILLIAM CONGREVE, The Mourning Bride

"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." - L COWARD, Private Lives

"When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have." - EDGAR WATSON HOWE, Country Town Sayings

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night

"Melody is a form of remembrance. . . It must have a quality of inevitability in our ears." - GIAN CARLO MENOTTI, quoted in Time

"Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" - SHAKESPEARE, Much Ado About Nothing

"If music be the food of love, play on;
'Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die."
- SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night

"Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned." - GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman

"Just as my fingers on the keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound."
- WALLACE STEVENS, Peter Quince at the Clavier

"Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all . . . music expresses itself." - IGOR STRAVINSKY, quoted in Esquire