God wants us to worship Him. He doesn't need us, for He couldn't be a self-sufficient God and need anything or anybody, but He wants us. When Adam sinned it was not he who cried, 'God, where art Thou?' It was God who cried, 'Adam, where art thou?'
Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
Should one ask: 'how do I cope with a well-ordered enemy host about to attack me?' I reply: seize something he cherishes and he will conform to your desires.
And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.