Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?

All melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating keynote of nature and spirit is sounded-the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which make the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap of the trees.

The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Most of the forward movements of life in general ... have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.