Music should humbly seek to please; within these limits great beauty may perhaps be found. Extreme complication is contrary to art. Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.

Art is what is irresistible.

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

The quality that made him great is that he loved greatly

Music religious heat inspires, It wakes the soul, and lifts it high, And wings it with sublime desires, And fits it to bespeak the Deity.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him.

The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music, my master!

I have never seen anyone who felt music so strongly and deeply as my father. It upset him, moved him, excited him, made him sob and weep. Sometimes it was even against his will, for it caused him pain and he said: "Que me veut cette musique?"

"Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".

The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.

And oft with holy hymns he charm'd their ears, And music more melodious than the spheres.

The extraordinary significance that music holds for Delacroix, and which contributes most to his admiration for Chopin, is a symptom of the new hierarchy of the arts and the prominent position which music occupies in it. It is the romantic art par excellence and Chopin the most romantic of all the romantics. In his relation to Chopin, Delacroix’s intimate connection with romanticism is brought most clearly to light.