Silence more musical than any song. [ Christina G. Rossetti ]
Great thoughts ensure musical expression. [ Emerson ]
It rose, that chanted mournful strain,
Like some lone spirit's over the plain;
'Twas musical, but sadly sweet,
Such as when winds and harp-strings meet,
And take a long unmeasured tone,
To mortal minstrelsy unknown. [ Byron ]
And the Sabbath bell,
That over wood and wild and mountain dell
Wanders so far, chasing all thoughts unholy
With sounds most musical, most melancholy. [ Samuel Rogers ]
Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy. [ Milton ]
There's a charm in delivery, a magical art,
That thrills like a kiss from the lip to the heart;
It is the glance - the expression - the well-chosen word -
By whose magic the depths of the spirit are stirred.
The lip's soft persuasion - its musical tone:
Oh! such were the charms of that eloquent one! [ Mrs. Welby ]
Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon. [ Bovee ]
Woman is a delightful musical instrument, of which love is the bow, and man the artist. [ Stendhal ]
Nature is an Aeolian harp, a musical instrument whose tones are the reecho of higher strings within us. [ Novalis ]
The heart is like a musical instrument of many strings, all the chords of which require putting in harmony. [ Saadi ]
How charming is divine philosophy! not harsh nor crabbed, as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute! [ Milton ]
All musical people seem to be happy. It is the engrossing pursuit - almost the only innocent and unpunished passion. [ Sydney Smith ]
The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it; but they are tuned differently in every one of us. [ Lowell ]
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
Paradise, as described by the theologians, seems to me too musical: I confess that I should be incapable of listening to a cantata that would last ten thousand years. [ T. Gautier ]
The lines of poetry, the periods of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be pre-eminently musical. [ Shenstone ]
It is quite as easy to give our children musical and pleasing names as those that are harsh and difficult; and it will be found by the owners, when they have grown to knowledge, that there is much in a name. [ Locke ]
I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine. [ R. W. Emerson ]
Poetry is musical thought, thought of a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of a thing, detected the melody that lies hidden in it, ... the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. [ Carlyle ]
Fine declamation does not consist in flowery periods, delicate allusions of musical cadences, but in a plain, open, loose style, where the periods are long and obvious, where the same thought is often exhibited in several points of view. [ Goldsmith ]
Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones. [ Shenstone ]