Susan's Books and Gifts

Susan's Thursday Note  July 23, 2015
Poetry and quotes on music feeding our souls

Good morning!   Silence outside.  Even the early birds are sleeping in this morning.  Waterlogged little brave frog rescued and now shivering under little buds that also seem lazy and not yet ready togreet this morning.  Faithful as always, my angel of dawn stands at my window, peering in with a warm smile, encouraging me to enter this summer day.  Encouraging me to watch creation wake up.  To notice the sunlight.  The dew.  To listen to little friends begin to wake up and start their singing a little off tune.  I read a poem recently on music being the encourager for our souls.  Music’s ability to meet us where nothing else can.  To let our souls march.  Following the poem are quotes that I love best about music and the role of music in our lives.  The mystery of song.  Healing.  Soothing.  Laughing.  Crying.  Every emotion able to be captured with notes.  Absolute beauty captured even in the quiet rests.  All to help bring us back to what is truly beautiful and brought to each of our doors by our angels this morning.  Music directly from our Creator.  Opened to the exact page to match our emotion of the moment.  To meet us where we are.  To lift us to where we’d like to be.

                            Daniel Whitehead Hicky

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Music is an outburst of the soul.”   Frederick Delius

“And the night shall be filled with music, 
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
and silently steal away.”   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow     

“Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”  George Eliot

“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”  Alphonse de Lamartine

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”  Leopold Stokowski

“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”  Henry David Thoreau  

“Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.”   Benjamin Disraeli

“Where words leave off, music begins.”  Heinrich Heine

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

“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”   Albert Einstein

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”  Confucius

“Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.”  Johann Sebastian Bach

“Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter — to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.”  Albert Schweitzer

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

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

“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.”   Ludwig van Beethoven

“Music… will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.”  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Music is … A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy”   Ludwig van Beethovin

“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.”   Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”  Leonard Bernstein

Again we have the promise that if we look to the heavens we will be given a peace that passes the understanding of anyone we meet.  “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”   Beautiful.  Our souls. No friend like music, breaking chains and bars…To let the soul march with the quiet stars.  

Thank you for letting me again enter your Thursday morning.  For coming into our beautiful store and letting me continue to be here for you.  Tonight we will have the chance to write the epitaph for the moments handed to us today.   Moments that we can only watch one particular grain of sand flow through as they pass.  Can we notice individual moments?   Listen to the pauses in our music.  Watch a child’s little foot.  Watch a little cold frog sit in the sun and regain his energy.  Enjoy the little robin hopping around.  Notice what is eternal.  The beauty created for us to keep our eternal perspective again today.  Have a beautiful summer day.  Regardless of what your particular musical composition holds today remember that only a drop to your knees mentally or a glimpse to the skies will help to focus on the beauty of this life.  I hope you can come into our store soon.  We’ll have the coffee, the peace, the smiles, and possibly a book that you will leave with that will change the rest of your life.  Susan

Latin for this week:
musica remedium optimum mentis maerentis  - music is the cure for a sorrowful mind
musica donum Dei – Music is a gift from God