“An educational foundation is only part of the equation. In order for creativity to flourish and imagination to take hold, we also need to expose our children to the arts from a very young age.” -First Lady Michelle Obama

“We need to ensure that our children have both knowledge and imagination. I know I want that for my girls. They deserve to have access to a good education and access to ideas and images that will spark their creativity.” -First Lady Michelle Obama

“If children are not introduced to music at an early age, I believe something fundamental is actually being taken from them.” -singer Luciano Pavarotti
“Music is an essential part of everything we do. Like puppetry, music has an abstract quality which speaks to a worldwide audience in a wonderful way that nourishes the soul.” -puppeteer Jim Henson

“To sing well and to dance well is to be well-educated.”-philosopher Plato

“Some people think music education is a privilege, but I think it’s essential to being human.”-singer/songwriter Jewel

“Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.”–lyricist Yip Harbug (wrote “Over the Rainbow”)

“The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.”-dancer and choreographer Agnes De Mille

“Music to me is like breathing—I don’t get tired of breathing, I don’t get tired of music.”-musician Ray Charles

“A child sings before it speaks, dances almost before it walks. Music is with us from the beginning.”-writer Pamela Brown

“Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.”-composer Leonard Bernstein

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

“Where words fail, music speaks.”-children’s author Hans Christian Andersen

“Study Bach. There you will find everything.”-composer Johannes Brahms

“Without music, life is a journey through a desert.”-author Pat Conroy

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.”-writer Victor Hugo

“When the music and dance create with accord their magic captivates both the heart and the mind.”-dancer Jean Georges Noverre

(…when asked about his theory of relativity….) “It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.” -physicist Albert Einstein

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents.”-composer Ludwig van Beethoven