Music Quotes
You have promise, Mlle. Dubois, but you must choose between an operatic career and what is usually called 'a normal life.' Though why it is so...
By Eric Taylor
There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass,...
By Alfred Tennyson
Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease! Reject me not into the world again....
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Perhaps it is nothingness which is real and our dream which is non-existent, but then we feel think that these musical phrases, and the notion...
By Marcel Proust
Let music sound while he doth make his choice; Then if he lose he makes a swan-like end, Fading in music.
By Shakespeare
Sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is music where ever there is a harmony, order, or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.
By Sir Thomas Browne
...music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself.
By Oscar Wilde
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music. Music
By Thomas Carlyle
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together. Music
By Richard M. Nixon
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
By Benjamin Britten
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.
By James Weldon Johnson
Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
By John Philip Sousa
Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent
By Victor Hugo
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. Music
By Victor Hugo
Music has often been compared with language itself, and the comparison is quite legitimate. While it combines easily with actual language, it also speaks a language of its own, which it has become a platitude to call universal. To understand the significance of the organizing factors of rhythm, melody, harmony, tone color and form, the analogy of a familiar language is helpful. Music has its own alphabet of only seven letters, as compared with the twenty-six of the English alphabet. Each of these letters represents a note, and just as certain letters are complete words in themselves, so certain notes may stand alone, with the force of a whole word. Generally, however, a note of music implies a certain harmony, and in most modern music the notes take the form of actual chords. So it may be said that a chord in music is analogous to a word in language. Several words form a phrase, and several phrases a complete sentence, and the same thing is true in music. Measured music corresponds to poetry, while the old unmeasured plain-song might be compared with prose.
By Sigmund Spaeth
Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. N.B.: This quote is commonly misquoted as savage beast.
By William Congreve
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. Music
By Plato
Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.
By Arthur Winter
Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.
By Baruch (_Benedict de) Spinoza
Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.
By Christian Nevell Bovee
Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity...
By Pau (Pablo) Casals
Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.
By Napoleon Bonaparte
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
By Maya Angelou
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
By Leonard Bernstein
Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
By Frank Zappa
No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.
By Frank Zappa
Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.
By Bill Cosby
People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.
By Witold Lutoslawski
Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.
By Jean Genet
Rock 'n Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.
By Greil Marcus
Rock and roll doesn't necessarily mean a band. It doesn't mean a singer, and it doesn't mean a lyric, really. It's that question of trying to be immortal.
By Malcolm Mclaren
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
By Ezra Pound
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
By Leonard Bernstein
The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.
By Frank Zappa
The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.
By Frank Sinatra
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.
By George Steiner
The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it's a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too.
By Billy Corgan
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.
By Igor Stravinsky
There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.
By Frank Zappa
There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
By Thomas Mann
There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.
By Ezra Pound
There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.
By Ron Wood
They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
By Wallace Stevens
Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.
By Jacques Attali
True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
By George Gershwin
We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.
By Peter (Stephen Paul) Brook
We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.
By Greil Marcus
What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile. Fix me a toddy, Lola, and we'll sit on the gallery of Tara and you play a tune and we'll watch evening fall and lightning bugs wink in the purple meadow.
By Walker Percy
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
By Colin Wilson
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
By W. H. Auden
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Music
By Aldous Huxley
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
By Jean Cocteau
Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.
By William Wordsworth
I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.
By Havelock Ellis
I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.
By Pau (Pablo) Casals
I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.
By Martin Luther
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.
By Billy Joel
I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.
By Bonnie Raitt
I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.
By Henri B. Stendhal
I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart's Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes...
By Samuel Butler
I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.
By James Brown
I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
By James Brown
If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.
By William Shakespeare
[During the 6th Annual Americana Music Conference, from September 8-10 in Nashville, an all-star] house band ... explore the linkages between social struggles, respect for fundamental rights and the recognition of personal dignity and community empowerment.
By Buddy Miller
I wonder how unique people realize that it is. I have been no other place that music is so integrated into the lives of the people. Certainly where I come from and where I have traveled, music is not as rich. Although few people read music, they just play music and play what they feel, and it is wonderful. It was just one of the most fun projects I have ever made. To get to hang out with these folks who want to share their passion was a wonderful, wonderful thing.
By Roger Sherman
Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.
By Liam Gallagher
I was able to believe when everything looked really dark and gray. I had a little break where the music carried me through. I love the music and performing this program. It's always so special to me no matter what happens. It goes beyond an athletic event and just becomes an emotional experience. I was able to attack the rest of the program.
By Anonymous
For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
By Plato
In addition to celebrating great blues music, we always wanted to make sure that proceeds from this endeavor flowed back to the musicians and to efforts to keep this wonderful music alive.
By Martin Scorsese
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
By George Eliot
I think it just shows the strength and depth of our music program. We've also had many bands that have performed, as well as orchestras. I think it's unusual a town the size of Odessa to have had so many groups invited to perform at this convention.
By Randy Talley
I've never missed a gig yet. Music makes people happy, and that's why I go on doing it - I like to see everybody smile.
By Buddy Guy
It's obvious to any music fan that the combo of all four of them is totally impressive, entertaining, charming, and better than a lot of music out there.
By John Richards
My parents have always been seriously helpful and behind it all the way. Although you think classical music is a different world, it's really not. The tours and recording sessions are basically the same.
By Lee Rocker
Music is my main goal, but I'm not going to rush a record out. There are so many actors who have come out with albums these days. I don't want to do it because it's the thing to do. I want to wait until the time is right.
By River Phoenix
Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.
By Bruce Springsteen
It's been a word-of-mouth phenomenon that none of us have really seen in music. I'm not sure there's anything we can compare it to. It's completely unprecedented.
By Laurence Bell
Online shopping, anything involving pictures, downloading music can use up too much of a taxed system.
By Jennifer Laster
Nobody will ever take Maurice's place, and he'll go on with us and he'll go on our music. He'll go on with us as the Bee Gees, and Maurice will always be with us.
By Robin Gibb
NYCO is a band comprised of NIU music alumni. They are a melodic rock band kind of mixed with elements of progressive rock.
By John Ugolini
Otherwise we will have a situation like what happened with the peer-to-peer problems in the music industry, and there will be a loss in revenue in the film industry, and then we won't be able to create the magic that we have in the past.
By James Cameron
It's sad. There is no original music scene in New Jersey anymore. There are cover bands, and I have nothing against them. I enjoy them myself. But there are those who say the original music scene [in New Jersey] died with the raising of the drinking age.
By Larry Collins
If you listen to our music, it's not just blatant Christian music. We went people to listen, look back at the music and ask themselves, 'What do they mean by this?' Then they can come to us and ask about the songs.
By Matt Clark
In December, we found out we were selected to be part of the music program featured on PBS to be broadcast March 9. It is part of their pledge drive. As a part of a pilot program, they are spotlighting music education in Kansas at that time.
By Judy Jones
If it's done right, whoever cracks the digital-music-on-the-cell-phone conundrum will do well,
By Neil Strother
I think early on he knew the prognosis wasn't good. He was basically incapacitated. He couldn't play music, he couldn't paint and after awhile, he couldn't read.
By Ron Lynam
I say in my book that a lot of the music our forebears created was written for rich, snotty, snobby people who had enough money to buy theatre tickets. There was a great deal of trivia, a shallow quality to things ... ... You know, that 'I've got rhythm, I've got ...', there's something about it that's not very serious, and at least popular music during our generation began crossing over into an area where it was saying something about the conditions that prevailed.
By Jimmy Webb
I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.
By Milton Babbitt
Digital music finally got off the ground in Europe in 2005, but it is important to retain a sense of perspective: paying for digital music is currently a niche activity and is still outweighed by file sharing which is conducted by 15 percent of European internet users.
By Mark Mulligan
Customers enjoy using the legal (Web) sites. They're going to do it if they can get (music) on their own terms.
By Brian Lucas
Apple Computer can argue that its use of the trademark has nothing to do with music. They could say, 'This isn't our music. We're selling access to this service.' That's another argument for a low royalty.
By Lee Bromberg
All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!
By Yoko Ono
What we've seen is that Warner and Seagram have produced figures that indicate their exposure to the music market has been poor and everyone had assumed that EMI would be equally affected,
By Paul Richards
We plan on bringing in a band that played during the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin on Feb. 24.
By James Cobb
We have a great lineup of music. We tried to keep the theme of diverse music, universal appeal.
By John Largay
We are so pleased to be able to offer a second installment of music from Dora on this new CD. We know parents and children alike are looking forward to enjoying these time honored dance favorites and Dora The Explorer Dance Fiesta! will surely become a children's classic.
By Joe DiMuro
Tobey can cry just like that. Whenever I have a crying scene, I have to listen to sad music, put my headphones on and kind of zone out.
By Kirsten Dunst
They're great songwriters in the tradition of the Beatles and Pink Floyd. Their songs are beautiful and filled with all sorts of wonderful textures. It's all very emotional and moving. It's the first outside project I've ever produced.
By Anonymous
This is the first music product that people consider to be an emotional statement.
By Richard Doherty
There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, ''It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.''
By Ezra Pound
There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
By Anonymous
The music of the Beatles is always fabulous, ... This groups plays it well but you wouldn't mistake them for the original.
By Linda Murphy
[The music services] have been anxious to [expand to Europe]. It's been the labels dragging their feet. The cloud cover is that there are a lot of different licensing authorities and things are fragmented over there. But when it gets to be important, the labels can get people in line.
By Phil Leigh
Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.
By Charlie Parker
“Music is a cascading waterfall of originality that submerges the tensions of reality and rationality always singing equality”
By wolvryn
The essence, message and purpose of music is realized not in competition but in unification
By wolvryn
“When the need to know overcomes the need to be then will the music of love start equating the love of (for) music”
By wolvryn
Music is not merely a well constructed arrangement of pleasing sounds, but more of a successful attempt to tap into the essence of life.
By T_Hagan
Question: Why do guys, especially teens/youngsters, hate Justin Babe--errr...? PS: Personally, I like this guy... Okay, his songs are full of s**t but well, he had the a** to create that s**t unlike other teens who still hog-on from their parents' plates. Well, this kid is self-made...he's done something... I like his guts... He can still woo the chicks of losers with his voice.
By Syed_Amaan_Ahmad