Music: A Book of Quotations

What is music? "God's best gift to man," as Walter Savage Landor said? "The moonlight in the gloomy night of life," as Jean Paul Richter put it? Or perhaps—as Carl Maria von Weber and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow agree —"the universal language of mankind"? Whatever it is, it certainly "hath charms to soothe the savage breast," as William Congreve famously observed. And it "expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent" (Victor Hugo).
These and more than 400 othe…