Tim's Favorite Quotes, part 4

Music

"Ahhh . . . Bach!"
—"Cpl. Walter 'Radar' O'Reilly" M*A*S*H

Autograph of BWV 1001, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BWV1001-cropped.jpg, PD

"It is as if God had made the world about us to be a grand organ of music, so that our feelings might have play in it, as our understanding has in the light of the sun and the outward colors and forms of things. ... It is not simply that we hear the sea roar and the floods clap their hands in anthems of joy; it is not that we hear the low winds sigh, or the storm howl dolefully, or the ripples break peacefully on the shore, or the waters dripping sadly from the rock, or the thunders crashing in horrible majesty through the pavements of heaven; not only do all the natural sounds we hear come to us in tones of music as interpreters of feeling, but there is hid in the secret temper and substance of all matter a silent music, that only waits to sound, and become a voice of utterance to the otherwise unutterable feeling of our heart--a voice, if we will have it, of love and worship to the God of all...."
—Address by Horace Bushnell, 1852, to the Beethoven Society at Yale, in Mary Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905, pp. 263-264.

Photograph of Horace Bushnell, anon, http://www.nndb.com/people/184/000102875/, PD

original 2 October 2009.