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Music of the spheres   /mjˈuzɪk əv ðə sfɪrz/   Listen
Music of the spheres

noun
1.
An inaudible music that Pythagoras thought was produced by the celestial.






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"Music of the spheres" Quotes from Famous Books



... embarrassments too serious to be laughed out of the way, will, I fear, detain me this month. But the month is already gone before you can receive this. I hope your philosophy will not have forsaken you. Far from you be gloom and despondency. Attune your organs to the genuine ha! ha! 'Tis to me the music of the spheres; the sovereign specific that shall disgrace the physician's art, and baffle the virulence of malady. Hold yourself aloof from all engagements, even of the heart. We will deliberate unbiased, that we may decide with wisdom. I form ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... begins with the songs of the three Archangels—sonorous verses of majestic harmony, like some grand overture by Bach or Handel. These verses are, I think, meant to intimate the great harmonious order and procession of the natural and moral universe, as Pythagoras intimated them by his 'Music of the Spheres'—those eternal laws against which man, that tiny ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... there not come to such an one—I know that it has come—that for which his spirit was athirst, the very breath of pure air, the very gleam of pure light, the very strain of pure music, for it is the very music of the spheres, in those same words, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come;" and he has answered, with a flush of keenest joy, Yes. Whatever else is unholy, there is an Holy One, spotless and undefiled, serene ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... thine; The eagle's vision cannot take it in; The lightning's glance, too weak to sweep its space, Sinks half-way o'er it, like a wearied bird: It is the mirror of the stars, where all Their hosts within the concave firmament, Gay marching to the music of the spheres, Can see themselves ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various

... Patron's maxims for his own? When ladies sing, or in thy presence play, Do not, dear John, in rapture melt away; 'Tis not thy part, there will be list'ners round, To cry Divine! and dote upon the sound; Remember, too, that though the poor have ears, They take not in the music of the spheres; They must not feel the warble and the thrill, Or be dissolved in ecstasy at will; Beside, 'tis freedom in a youth like thee To drop his awe, and deal in ecstasy! "In silent ease, at least in silence, dine, Nor one opinion start of food or wine: Thou knowest that all the ...
— Tales • George Crabbe

... motor nerves. The joy of receiving power is great: "stimulus" we call it. It comes to us along the avenues of sense and thrills us with increased well being. But this kind of pleasure is sadly limited by those sense nerves of ours. We are but a little tea-cup: we cannot hold much. The Music of the Spheres might pour round us; the light of a thousand suns, the sweetness of piled banks of flowers, and all honey and sugar and rich food: every sense can be fed to its little limit ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... human comprehension as vague (an attempt at the contemplation of which would be without profit in this connection), and what has been called the "music of the spheres,"[3] we may proceed to briefly touch upon those forms of natural music which are ever within our hearing, and which ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter

... it said that shaking the rattles had a strange effect on certain animals. A canary bird sings and a rattler rattles. Perhaps they both think they are improving the music of the spheres." ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay

... and moon by her bright eyes Eclips'd, and darken'd in the skies, 610 Are but black patches, that she wears, Cut into suns, and moons, and stars: By which astrologers as well, As those in Heav'n above, can tell What strange events they do foreshow 615 Unto her under-world below. Her voice, the music of the spheres, So loud, it deafens mortals ears; As wise philosophers have thought; And that's the cause we hear it not. 620 This has been done by some, who those Th' ador'd in rhime, would kick in prose; And in those ribbons ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... now," he said. "You'll find your moving planet. I'm not more Than one degree in error." He left his proofs; But Airy, king of Greenwich, looked askance At unofficial genius in the young, And pigeon-holed that music of the spheres. Nine months he waited till Le Verrier, too, Pointed to that same region of the sky. Then Airy, opening his big sleepy lids, Bade Challis use his telescope,—too late, To make that honour all his country's ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... ambient the fundamental chord, resolvable into the diatonic scale—as we look upon the beam of white which the prism decomposes into the solar spectrum, and in the ghostly watches of the night, we might recognize the 'music of the spheres' as the planets rushed around their airy orbits, with a noise like the 'noise of many waters,' no longer a poetic ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... this calculated harmony that men, seeking to interpret it by what was most harmonious in themselves or in their human experience, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals: Plato as we see (who learned of Pythagoras) inventing his Octave of Sirens, perched on the whorls of the great spindle and intoning as ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... finer optics given, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven? Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er, To smart and agonize at every pore? Or quick effluvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain? If nature thundered in his opening ears, And stunned him with the music of the spheres, How would he wish that Heaven had left him still The whispering zephyr, and the purling rill? Who finds not Providence all good and wise, Alike in what it gives and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... no more those passions' dreams, While musing near these quiet streams; That biting state of savage lust Which, true love absent, burns to dust. Gold's rattle shall not rob my ears Of this sweet music of the spheres. I'll walk abroad with fancy free; Each leafy, summer's morn I'll see The trees, all legs or bodies, when They vary in their shapes like men. I'll walk abroad and see again How quiet pools are pricked by rain; And you shall ...
— Foliage • William H. Davies

... having yielded you information as to pay day, due day, and holiday, you obliterate at the end of each month without a qualm, oblivious to the fact that were your interests less sordid and personal it would speak to you of that order which pervades the universe; would make you realize something of the music of the spheres. For on that familiar checkerboard of the days are numerical arrangements which are mysterious, "magical"; each separate number is as a spider at the center of an amazing mathematical web. That is to say, every number is discovered to be half of the sum of the pairs of numbers which surround ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... Sah-luma!" he said with a sort of passionate eagerness,—"Thy bright soul shall live forever in a sunshine sweeter than that of earth's fairest midsummer noon! Thy song can never be silenced while heaven pulsates with the unwritten music of the spheres,—and even were the crown of immortality denied to lesser men, it is, it must be the heritage of the poet! For to him all crowns belong, all kingdoms are thrown open, all barriers broken down,—even those that divide us from ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... think of Father Calvi, I am reminded at the same time of the old man that stands beside Raphael's Saint Cecilia listening intently to the music of the spheres. ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... Pythagoras. He was the same man, if we may credit the story, who afterwards migrated to Italy and became the founder of the famous Crotonian School of Philosophy; the man who developed the religion of the Orphic mysteries; who conceived the idea of the music of the spheres; who promulgated the doctrine of metempsychosis; who first, perhaps, of all men clearly conceived the notion that this world on which we live is a ball which moves in space and which may be habitable ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... Newlands discovered that when he arranged the elements of matter in the order of their atomic weight, they displayed the same relationship to one another as do the tones in the musical scale. Thus modern chemistry demonstrates the verity of the music of the spheres—another visionary concept of ancient mysticism. The individual atoms in themselves, as well as all the atoms of matter in their relationship to one another, are constructed and arranged in exact correspondence with the laws of harmony. Therefore the entire sidereal ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... lamentation 'mid the murmuring nocturne noises, And an undertone of sadness, as from myriad human voices, And the harmony of heaven and the music of the spheres, And the ceaseless throb of Nature, and the flux and flow of years, Are rudely punctuated with the drip of human tears ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... Let the music of the spheres, Captivate their mortal ears; While Jove descends into this tower, In a golden streaming shower. To disguise him from the eye Of Juno, who is apt to pry Into my pleasures: I to day Have bid Ganymede go to play, And thus stole from Heaven to be Welcome on earth ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... whose soul is the soul of the untilled ground!" he said, "wouldst thou place thy music, that is like the wind in the reeds, beside my music, which is as the music of the spheres?" ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... vivification about you that may be felt ten feet away!" She looked at him with affection and now seriously. "I know, I think, the look of one who comes into spiritual treasures. This is that and not that. It is the wilderness of lovely flowers—hardly quite the music of the spheres! It is not the mountain height, but the waving, leafy, lower slopes—and yet we pass on to the height by those slopes! Are you ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and {120} Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock



Words linked to "Music of the spheres" :   euphony, music



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