The sweetest of all sounds is praise. [ Xenophon ]
The world recedes; it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring:
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy victory?
O Death! where is thy sting? [ Pope ]
Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office; and his tongue
Sounds ever after as a sullen bell,
Remember'd tolling a departed friend. [ Shakespeare ]
There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;
How soft the music of those village bells.
Falling at intervals upon the ear,
In cadence sweet, now dying all away. [ Cowper ]
The greatest sounds are not the best music. [ Proverb ]
'Tis a stern and a startling thing to think
How often mortality stands on the brink
Of its grave without any misgiving;
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife.
There are daily sounds to tell us that Life
Is dying, and Death is living! [ Hood ]
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 ]
We tremble all over before the bugle sounds. [ Virgil ]
Lightning and thunder (heaven's artillery)
As harbingers before th' Almighty fly:
Those but proclaim His style, and disappear;
The stiller sounds succeed, and God is there. [ John Dryden ]
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. [ William Shakespeare ]
The crackling embers on the hearth are dead;
The indoor note of industry is still;
The latch is fast; upon the window-sill
The small birds wait not for their daily bread;
The voiceless flowers - how quietly they shed
Their nightly odours; - and the household rill
Murmurs continuous dulcet sounds that fill
The vacant expectation, and the dread
Of listening night. [ Hartley Coleridge ]
And softened sounds along the waters die:
Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play. [ Pope ]
My people too were scared with eerie sounds,
A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls,
A noise of falling weights that never fell.
Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand.
Door-handles turn'd when none was at the door.
And bolted doors that open'd of themselves;
And one betwixt the dark and light had seen
Her, bending by the cradle of her babe. [ Tennyson ]
Let me die to the sounds of the delicious music. [ Mirabeau ]
These wickets of the soul are placed so high,
Because all sounds do highly move aloft;
And that they may not pierce too violently,
They are delay'd with turns and twinings oft.
For should the voice directly strike the brain,
It would astonish and confuse it much;
Therefore these plaits and folds the sound restrain,
That it the organ may more gently touch. [ Sir John Davies ]
The fowler's pipe sounds sweet, till the bird is caught. [ Proverb ]
Trust not this hollow world; she's empty; hark, she sounds. [ Quarles ]
What an eye she has! methinks it sounds a parley of provocation. [ William Shakespeare ]
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune. [ Thomas Fuller ]
Opinion, which on crutches walks, And sounds the words another talks. [ Lloyd ]
The true poetic soul needs but to be struck, and the sounds it yields will be music. [ Carlyle ]
When a head and a book come into collision, and one sounds empty, is it always the book? [ Lichtenberg ]
Why should not a scientific convention harmonize the letters of the alphabet with the sounds of the languages? [ J. A. Weisse ]
Imagination is always the ruling and divine power, and the rest of the man is only the instrument which it sounds, or the tablet on which it writes. [ John Ruskin ]
Whenever I am in doubt about a sentence I read it aloud to see how it sounds, and indeed, always read the whole book through aloud, sometimes more than once, before it goes to the press. [ Ada Ellen Bayly, a.k.a. Edna Lyall, English novelist and early feminist, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought. [ Theodore T. Munger ]
I am constitutionally susceptible of noises; a carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness; but those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. [ C. Lamb ]
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune; such is the extensiveness thereof, that it stoopeth so low as brute beasts, yet mounteth as high as angels; horses will do more for a whistle than for a whip, and by hearing their bells, jingle away their weariness. [ T. Fuller ]
There are two things which help to make music - melody and harmony. Now, as most of you know, there is melody in music when the different sounds of the same tune follow each other so as to give us pleasure; there is harmony in music when different sounds, instead of following each other, come at the same time so as to give us pleasure. [ C. Kingsley ]
All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent. [ Emerson ]