In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.

My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they're two or three? Chimpanzees don't dance.

In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I'm strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn't help thinking, 'That must be what the hand of God is like.'

I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.