Music Quotes



Welcome to Music Quotes. Here you will find famous quotes and quotations about music.

Music Quotes and Quotations

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green

A man's screech should exceed his rasp, or what's a violin for? ~Stuart Rogers

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it? ~Charles Ives

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~Aldous Huxley

Music Quotes and Quotations

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! ~Thomas Carlyle

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it. ~Jean Cocteau

All music is beautiful. ~Billy Strayhorn

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song. ~Louis Armstrong

An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like. From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts. ~Kit Coleman

Music Quotes and Quotations

Any good music must be an innovation. ~Les Baxter

Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all. ~Helmut Walcha

But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing. ~Bryan Ferry

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. ~Kin Hubbard

Music Quotes and Quotations

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism. ~Howard Dietz

Country music is three chords and the truth. ~Harlan Howard

Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music. ~Isaac Stern

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness. ~Reba McEntire

He has Van Gogh's ear for music. ~Billy Wilder

Music Quotes and Quotations

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning

He who sings scares away his woes. ~Cervantes

Hell is full of musical amateurs. ~George Bernard Shaw

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What's the buzz on the street with the kids? She's going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren't into Kiss. But they've all been told that it's the greatest show on Earth. ~Ace Frehley

I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds. ~Dizzy Gillespie

Music Quotes and Quotations

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to. ~Elvis Presley

I don't make music for eyes. I make music for ears. ~Adele

I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality. ~H.A. Overstreet

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music. ~Billy Joel

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Music Quotes and Quotations

I wake up in the morning, I do a little stretching exercises, pick up the horn and play. ~Herb Alpert

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water. ~Ray Charles

I was growing up listening to Queen. Freddie Mercury threw those incredible melodies into his songs. ~Gary Cherone

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~Gustav Mahler

Music Quotes and Quotations

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. ~Simon Rattle

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth. Sydney Smith

If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it. ~Doménico Cieri Estrada

If music be the food of love, play on. ~William Shakespeare

If the King loves music, it is well with the land. ~Mencius

Music Quotes and Quotations

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. ~John Cage

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music. ~Thomas Carlyle

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together. ~Richard M. Nixon

In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony. ~Benjamin Britten

Music Quotes and Quotations

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created. ~Bruce Beresford

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de LaPrade

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people. ~Stevie Nicks

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed. ~B. B. King

Music Quotes and Quotations

Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains. ~John Philip Sousa

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. ~William F. Buckley, Jr.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music. ~Ronald Reagan

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. ~Henry David Thoreau

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific. ~Aaron Copland

Music can change the world because it can change people. ~Bono

Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music. ~Jimi Hendrix

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

Music Quotes and Quotations

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language. ~Herbie Hancock

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. ~Buffy Sainte-Marie

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. ~William Congreve

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe. ~Lao Tzu

Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker. ~William Green

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. ~Plato

Music is a performance and needs the audience. ~Michael Tippett

Music is always changing and the changes are unpredictable. ~Billy Sheehan

Music is an outburst of the soul. ~Frederick Delius

Music Quotes and Quotations

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. ~John Lennon

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. ~Paul Simon

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions. ~Jacques Barzun

Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul

Music is my religion. ~Jimi Hendrix

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune. ~Thomas Fuller

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde

Music is the best means we have of digesting time. ~W. H. Auden

Music Quotes and Quotations

Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence. ~Robert Fripp

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music. ~Christian Nestell Bovee

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is the medicine of the breaking heart. ~Leigh Hunt

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue. ~Plato

Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter

Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy

Music is the soul of language. ~Max Heindel

Music is the universal language of mankind. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer

Music Quotes and Quotations

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is very spiritual, it has the power to bring people together. ~Edgar Winter

Music is well said to be the speech of angels. ~Thomas Carlyle

Music is what feelings sound like. ~Author Unknown

Music is what life sounds like. ~Eric Olson

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. ~Charlie Parker

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. ~Anais Nin

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. ~Ezra Pound

Music should be your escape. ~Missy Elliot

Music Quotes and Quotations

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ~Maya Angelou

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder. ~John Ruskin

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something. ~Frank Zappa

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. ~Henri Rabaud

Music's not like becoming a doctor, who can walk into a community and find people who need him. ~Charlie Byrd

Music's staying power is a function of how timeless the lyrics, song and production are. ~Gary Wright

Music's the medicine of the mind. ~John A. Logan

My father used to sing to me in my mother's womb. I think I can name about any tune in two beats. ~Yancy Butler

Music Quotes and Quotations

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require. ~Edward Elgar

My music had roots which I'd dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil. ~Ray Charles

My music, my songs are 100 percent inspired by girl power. ~Paulina Rubio

My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle. ~Liberace

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. ~W. H. Auden

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain. ~Bob Marley

Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. ~Robert Benchley

Play the music, not the instrument. ~Author Unknown

Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country. ~Edmund G. Brown

Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off. ~Bryan Ferry

Music Quotes and Quotations

Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting. ~Michael Stipe

Strong lager and some early Zep tunes. I ask thee, is there a better way to spend an evening? ~Author Unknown

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees. ~Andres Segovia

The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life… the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril. ~Richard Baker

The iPod completely changed the way people approach music. ~Karl Lagerfeld

The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet. ~Oliver Herford

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial. ~Leonard Bernstein

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel

Music Quotes and Quotations

The pause is as important as the note. ~Truman Fisher

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic. ~Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The real art of conducting consists in transitions. ~Gustav Mahler

The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief. ~S.A. Sachs

The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera. ~Dave Barry

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master. ~Duke Ellington

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another. ~Frank Zappa

There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is. ~William P. Merrill

There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument. ~Aimee Mann

There's nothing like music to relieve the soul and uplift it. ~Mickey Hart

Music Quotes and Quotations

Truly to sing, that is a different breath. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli

What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned. ~Stephen Dunn, about music

What passion cannot music raise and quell! ~John Dryden

What we provide is an atmosphere... of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way. Under its influence I've seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell. ~Meyer Davis

When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke

Without music, life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. ~Laurie Anderson

Music Quotes and Quotations

You are the music while the music lasts. ~T. S. Eliot

You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed? ~Bryan Ferry

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. ~Oscar Levant

You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works. ~Van Morrison

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