The Spirit of This Place Quotes

“No one wants another trite conclusion that [music is] all just about love after all. It is about much more than love...There is a deeper dimension than love alone, which includes joy, awareness, compassion, empathy. Music may not prove anything about love, science, philosophy -- or to use an outmoded but thoroughly useful word -- our souls; but it is also hard to imagine music not gently touching them in some way.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“Just because there is more to learn about [theories] does not negate the extent of what we do and can know. This feels like a constant spiritual lesson.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“Art and spirituality share a deeply important characteristic: their ultimate purpose is to entice the individual to self-reflection”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“If your practice, whether spiritual, religious, artistic, or some combination thereof, is not making your more joyful and open toward the world, you should question why you are doing it.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“The aesthetic ideal of the city [Houston] has always been empathy.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“The human landscape of Houston more than makes up for the lack of mountains and beaches... Houston is about the integrity, generosity, dedication, and love of its people.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“It is the rare adult who maintains a childlike vision of the world and is at the same time able to live within it.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“Music is a device for unlocking the spirit”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“Music is a spiritual practice for no other reason but that it organizes silence, and it shares many qualities with spiritual practice: for those who love music, it comes with a system of beliefs that they adhere to very strongly and devotedly. It gives meaning to life.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“...we are what we do, what we create; we are not simply what we believe or say.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

“All of the world's religions revolve, at least on the surface, around the impetus and origin of human consciousness, on why we are here and who created us. There is a humanistic tendency to claim that all religions offer basically the same story in different ways, but this is patently untrue, and to suggest so is to insult the memory of the countless millions who have died defending their versions of their faiths, their own preferred origin stories.”
― Patrick Summers, The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit