Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.

Schweitzer contrasts music’s capacity to articulate the full range of human feeling—joy through lamentation—with its paradoxical power to calm and reframe experience. The image of a mountain lake suggests that music does not erase emotion; it reflects it, holding it in a clarified, contemplative medium. In that reflective “water,” reality appears reordered and intelligible, as if the listener has been lifted out of agitation into a vantage point of stillness. The quote thus treats music as both expressive and transformative: it gives voice to inner life while simultaneously transposing it into a realm of peace where perception becomes deeper, more unified, and less captive to immediate turmoil.