“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

— Aldous Huxley

"The Rest is Silence"
Source: Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

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Aldous Huxley 290

English writer 1894–1963

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“Hymn tunes are the nearest we've got to English folk music.”

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citation needed

“Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express.”

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As quoted in Debussy (1989) by Paul Holmes, p. 36
Context: Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.

“Music for entertainment … seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 271

“What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.”

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“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”

Victor Hugo book William Shakespeare

Ce qu’on ne peut dire et ce qu’on ne peut taire, la musique l’exprime.
Part I, Book II, Chapter IV
William Shakespeare (1864)
Variant: Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent
Source: Hugo's Works: William Shakespeare

“There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always.
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Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Source: Good Morning, America

“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

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Aldous Huxley 290

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