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Music Quotes
Best Quotes About Music (Top 100)
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Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.
Bob Marley -
Who are you to judge the life I live? I know I'm not perfect -and I don't live to be- but before you start pointing fingers... make sure you hands are clean!
Bob Marley -
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo -
I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.
Jimi Hendrix -
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou -
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley -
Where words leave off, music begins.
Heinrich Heine -
If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.
William Shakespeare -
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
Charles Darwin -
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer -
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Anais Nin -
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau -
We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy -
Somebody just gave me a shower radio. Thanks a lot. Do you really want music in the shower? I guess there's no better place to dance than a slick surface next to a glass door.
Jerry Seinfeld -
You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
Ansel Adams -
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller -
Where words fail, music speaks.
Hans Christian Andersen -
Music is the universal language of mankind.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?
Bob Marley -
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
Ludwig van Beethoven -
Be yourself, don't take anything from anyone, and never let them take you alive.
Gerard Way -
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Hunter S. Thompson -
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST.
Frank Zappa -
If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.
John Lennon -
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
Albert Einstein -
Songs are as sad as the listener.
Jonathan Safran Foer -
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
Frank Zappa -
To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
Aaron Copland -
Music is the strongest form of magic.
Marilyn Manson -
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein -
Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.
Henry Rollins -
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Edith Sitwell -
It's better to burn out, than to fade away.
Neil Young -
Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
Lao Tzu -
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
Samuel Butler -
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -
The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.
Kurt Cobain -
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
Robert Browning -
Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
Steve Martin -
People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
Bob Dylan -
We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams. World-losers and world-forsakers, Upon whom the pale moon gleams; Yet we are the movers and shakers, Of the world forever, it seems.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy -
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
Hans Christian Andersen -
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
Tennessee Williams -
Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran -
I've come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power.
Jason Mraz -
Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.
Confucius -
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann -
Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it.
Bono -
My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.
Bob Marley -
Half of life is up - the other half is dealing with it.
Henry Rollins -
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.
Truman Capote -
Music is an outburst of the soul.
Frederick Delius -
Music is my religion.
Jimi Hendrix -
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
Oscar Wilde -
I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.
Henry Rollins -
Music fills the infinite between two souls.
Rabindranath Tagore -
Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach -
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy -
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
Pat Conroy -
Some guy said to me: Don't you think you're too old to sing rock n' roll? I said: You'd better check with Mick Jagger.
Cher -
To play without passion is inexcusable!
Ludwig van Beethoven -
All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.
Frank Zappa -
Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.
Steve Martin -
My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.
Bob Marley -
I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new, and that is ultimately good for the artist.
Billy Joel -
The Beatles will go on and on.
George Harrison -
I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.
Henry Rollins -
Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.
John Lennon -
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
Henry David Thoreau -
If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf -
Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
Ludwig van Beethoven -
Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.
Ludwig van Beethoven -
There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
Pythagoras -
My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.
Harry S. Truman -
There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.
John Keats -
Music can change the world because it can change people.
Bono -
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
Ingmar Bergman -
The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach -
You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.
Jerry Garcia -
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
Ludwig van Beethoven -
I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.
Jimi Hendrix -
My music is the spiritual expression of what I am " my faith, my knowledge, my being...When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups...I want to speak to their souls.
John Coltrane -
If you take responsibility for yourself you will develop a hunger to accomplish your dreams.
Les Brown -
When you were young, and your heart, was an open book. You used to say, live and let live.
Paul McCartney -
I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you plan the stereo at max volume, it's almost like the other people can't see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.
Chuck Klosterman -
Ignore all hatred and criticism. Live for what you create, and die protecting it.
Lady Gaga -
Only sick music makes money today.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
Michel de Montaigne -
It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach -
For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.
Eric Clapton -
There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.
Boris Vian -
Why not just live in the moment, especially if it has a good beat?
Goldie Hawn -
So, you can make me come, that doesn't make you Jesus.
Tori Amos -
Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.
Billie Holiday -
Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.
Henry Rollins -
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
Jerry Garcia
Even More Music Quotes
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Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.
Stevie Wonder -
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
Igor Stravinsky -
I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.
John Coltrane -
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
John Cage -
If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
Louis Armstrong -
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
Charlie Parker -
The future is unwritten.
Joe Strummer -
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
John Burroughs -
Where there is devotional music, God is always at hand with His gracious presence.
Johann Sebastian Bach -
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
Albert Einstein -
My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.
Billy Connolly -
Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.
George Gershwin -
Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
Louis Armstrong -
Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.
Ludwig van Beethoven -
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
Stanley Kubrick -
Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.
Pablo Casals -
What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong -
Music does bring people together. It allows us to experience the same emotions. People everywhere are the same in heart and spirit. No matter what language we speak, what color we are, the form of our politics or the expression of our love and our faith, music proves: We are the same.
John Denver -
If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.
Billie Holiday -
..my music isn't just music- its medicine.
Kanye West -
Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play.
Willie Nelson -
Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn't mean he lacks vision.
Stevie Wonder -
Music is the silence between the notes.
Claude Debussy -
Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.
George Carlin -
You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.
John Coltrane -
If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.
Arnold Schoenberg -
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
John Cage -
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Albert Camus -
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Frederic Chopin -
Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
William Congreve -
Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.
Jimi Hendrix -
The only thing better than singing is more singing.
Ella Fitzgerald -
Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you.
Charlie Parker -
I don't deal in technique. I deal in emotions.
Jimmy Page -
If you've lost your faith in love and music then the end won't be long.
Pete Doherty -
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Gustav Mahler -
All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.
Louis Armstrong -
I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear.
Freddie Mercury -
Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
Johannes Brahms -
Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.
Salvador Dali -
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
John Cage -
This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely,more beautifully,more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein -
Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.
Jimmy Carter -
I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.
Thom Yorke -
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
John Milton -
My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.
Louis Armstrong -
The hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.
Eddie Van Halen -
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington -
Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
Tom Lehrer -
An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Henry Miller -
Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.
Mary Kay Ash -
The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
Bruce Springsteen -
Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music.
Isaac Stern -
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 -
If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it
Isadora Duncan -
Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
Claude Debussy -
My driving philosophy about making music is that you can reduce it all down to one note if that note is played with the right kind of sincerity.
Eric Clapton -
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
Charles Mingus -
Don't be afraid, just play the music.
Charlie Parker -
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 -
The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music.
George Carlin -
Music washes away the dust of every day life.
Art Blakey -
I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.
Ella Fitzgerald -
Music is more than just listening to it. People use the music for them protection at times.
Burning Spear -
I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police.
Keith Richards -
Good music always defeats bad luck
Jack Vance -
It's hard to get along with people. As much as you try to like them and accept them as individuals, it becomes difficult because they keep getting out of line and wasting your time.
Henry Rollins -
Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself.
Erik Satie -
Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
Miles Davis -
Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.
Paul Simon -
Music is only love looking for words.
Lawrence Durrell -
All In All Is All We Are
Kurt Cobain -
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
Charles Mingus -
If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, cause there's a million ways to be, you know that there are.
Cat Stevens -
I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches. Have you ever heard the earth breathe?
Kate Chopin -
There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing.
Donald Miller -
Men trust their ears less than their eyes.
Herodotus -
Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment. Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.
John James Audubon -
Music begins where the possibilities of language end.
Jean Sibelius -
Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.
Martin Luther -
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Groucho Marx -
Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn't play like Wynton.
Chet Baker -
Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way.
Billie Holiday -
I'm a musician at heart, I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.
Nat King Cole -
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Karl A. Menninger -
In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony.
Eva Burrows -
You can cage the singer but not the song.
Harry Belafonte -
There's people making babies to my music. That's nice.
Barry White -
I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
Claude Debussy -
The song is ended, but the melody lingers on...
Irving Berlin -
I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood.
John Coltrane -
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Berthold Auerbach -
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'.
Bob Newhart -
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.
Elvis Costello -
Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.
Lou Reed -
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I dont claim responsibility and dont hold any great truck with.
David Gilmour -
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan -
Philosophy is the highest music.
Plato -
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.
Bill Cosby -
I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts, 'cause they were cooler; they had better taste in music, for one thing, I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!
John Hughes -
The reason we're successful, darling? My overall charisma, of course.
Freddie Mercury -
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
Truman Capote -
So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
Aaron Copland -
Life is one grand sweet song so start the music
Ronald Reagan -
My job in this life is to give people spiritual ecstasy through music. In my concerts people cry, laugh, dance. If they climaxed spiritually, I did my job. I did it decently and honestly.
Carlos Santana -
I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.
Billie Holiday -
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
Claude Debussy -
When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love.
Franz Schubert -
You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
Charlie Parker -
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
Igor Stravinsky -
i dont want to be compared to britney,ashlee,hilary or lindsay. i want to be compared to me.
Avril Lavigne -
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.
Leonard Bernstein -
Music is the soundtrack of your life.
Dick Clark -
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Agnes de Mille -
Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.
Ravi Shankar -
Years from now, after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me.
Chet Atkins -
If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.
Jascha Heifetz -
Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.
Count Basie -
From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.
Alfred North Whitehead -
We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.
Zoltan Kodaly -
Without Elvis none of us could have made it.
Buddy Holly -
The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.
Harold Clurman -
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
Richard M. Nixon -
Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.
Charlie Parker -
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on Simplicity.
Plato -
Let us go singing as far as we go: the road will be less tedious.
Virgil -
The true musician is to bring light into people's hearts.
Bobby McFerrin -
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'
Aaron Copland -
A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.
Gustav Mahler -
A musician's or artist's responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth,
Tom Morello -
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach -
Rock n' Roll came from the slaves singing gospel in the fields. Their lives were hell and they used music to lift out of it, to take them away. That's what rock n' roll should do - take you to a better place.
Meat Loaf -
Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.
Luciano Pavarotti -
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
Igor Stravinsky -
My first wife said, 'It's either thatguitar or me,' you know — and I giveyou three guesses which one went.
Jeff Beck -
I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.
Bing Crosby -
Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a mistake.
John Cleese -
I'm gonna put a curse on you and all your kids will be born completely naked.
Jimi Hendrix -
The way I feel about music is that there is no right and wrong. Only true and false.
Fiona Apple -
A song without music is a lot like H2 without the O.
Ira Gershwin -
What I like best about music is when time goes away.
Bob Weir -
Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre.
Billy Corgan -
Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the two there is you, unstoppable.
Grace Slick -
Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.
Ani DiFranco -
I'll make music, whether or not anyone is listening, for the rest of my life. It's a natural form of expression for me, the same way I draw and write and sing.
Brandon Boyd -
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
Albert Einstein -
The thing that influenced me most was the way Tommy played his trombone. It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin-not sounding like them, but "playing" the voice like those instrumentalists.
Frank Sinatra -
My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.
Countee Cullen -
The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.
Igor Stravinsky -
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?
Igor Stravinsky -
If a guy's got it, let him give it. I'm selling music, not prejudice.
Benny Goodman -
I like music that's more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.
Iggy Pop -
Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.
Josephine Baker -
We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.
Louis Armstrong -
If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.
Claude Debussy -
To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other
Jack Handy -
This is so nice, it must be illegal.
Fats Waller -
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Walter Pater -
Talent is only the starting point.
Irving Berlin -
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
Igor Stravinsky -
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
Irving Berlin -
I have always kept one end in view, namely ... to conduct a well-regulated church music to the honour of God.
Johann Sebastian Bach -
ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.
Gerard Manley Hopkins -
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Hector Berlioz -
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw -
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
W. H. Auden -
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Butler -
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
Arnold Bennett -
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 -
It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.
Mary Chapin Carpenter -
Music is a necessity. After food, air, water and warmth, music is the next necessity of life.
Keith Richards -
Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation - what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.
William Lyon Phelps -
If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
Thomas Carlyle -
Country fans need to support country music by buying albums and concert tickets for traditional artists or the music will just fade away. And that would be really sad.
George Jones -
If you play a tune and a person don't tap their feet, don't play the tune.
Count Basie -
There was a time when the music fell silent. Both within me and around me.
Agnetha Faltskog -
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein -
I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.
Alex Winter -
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
Igor Stravinsky -
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
William Faulkner -
The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.
Heinrich Heine -
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 -
Mozart is sweet sunshine.
Antonin Dvorak -
In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.
Antonin Dvorak -
Music is the last true voice of the human spirit. It can go beyond language, beyond age, and beyond color straight to the mind and heart of all people.
Ben Harper -
A name doesn't make the music. It's just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.
Art Blakey -
Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.
Chet Atkins -
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.
Buddy Guy -
Don't gain the world and lose your soul; wisdom is better than silver or gold.
Bob Marley -
You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.
Billie Holiday -
If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.
Charlie Parker -
The consolidation of the music business has made it difficult to encourage styles like the blues, all of which deserve to be celebrated as part of our most treasured national resources.
Bonnie Raitt -
Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.
Frank Capra -
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
Elvis Presley -
Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.
Hector Berlioz -
Music is something that always lifts my spirits and makes me happy, and when I make music I always hope it will have the same effect on whoever listens to it.
Aaron Carter -
What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.
Philip Glass -
Music is like girlfriends to me; I'm continually astonished by the choices other people make.
David Lee Roth -
You don't need any brains to listen to music.
Luciano Pavarotti -
Death is very often referred to as a good career move.
Buddy Holly -
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
Marcel Marceau -
Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.
Billy Gibbons -
May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.
James Joseph Sylvester -
There is only one real happiness in life, and that is the happiness of creating.
Frederick Delius -
Music connects with the soul. I think it's the quickest art form to the soul.
Chris Tomlin -
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky -
For me, music and life are all about style.
Miles Davis -
A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.
Billie Holiday -
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
Ken Burns -
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.
Artur Schnabel -
A lot of pop music is about stealing pocket money from children.
Ian Anderson -
Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
Jean Paul -
I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.
Bela Bartok -
We do this for the art, not the adulation. I'd rather our music get liked and we get ignored. I don't want to be adored for anything other than the music.
Andy Partridge -
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.
Igor Stravinsky -
Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!
Count Basie -
If there is one thing that is constant in this world, it is the power of music.
Josh Groban -
Music before all else, and for that choose the irregular, which is vaguer and melts better into the air...
Paul Verlaine -
Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.
Marcel Marceau -
I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed... I have sung my songs all over the world and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs as their own.
Paul Robeson -
Music is like making love: either all or nothing.
Isaac Stern -
Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off.
Bryan Ferry -
I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.
Gene Kelly -
In my music, my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea: to be African.
Paul Robeson -
Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.
Walter Savage Landor -
There are more bad musicians than there is bad music.
Isaac Stern -
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
Stephen Sondheim -
But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.
Ralph Vaughan Williams -
I should think that being my old lady would be all the satisfaction or career any woman needs
Mick Jagger -
Once you become predictable, no one's interested anymore.
Chet Atkins -
I have a responsibility to pass on to the next generation what I learned from my teachers, ... It keeps me young and reminds me where I came from. Teaching young artists is like giving water to a flower.
Isaac Stern -
Be honest with yourself and the way you act when you hear music. That way, when people watch, they'll see something from your heart and soul, and as a result will communicate your feeling and thought much better.
Billy Sheehan -
I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
Charles Mingus -
Some things get better with age. Like me.
Keith Richards -
Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world. You meet people at festivals and renew acquaintances year after year.
Bill Monroe -
Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.
Charles de Lint -
Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
Dave Brubeck -
Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.
Alfred Jarry -
When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed the point.
Maria Callas -
Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
Claude Levi-Strauss -
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
Milan Kundera -
We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
Lewis Thomas -
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.
Jean Genet -
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.
Igor Stravinsky -
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 -
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
Ira Gershwin -
There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.
Sun Tzu -
The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.
William Shakespeare -
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
Kin Hubbard -
They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
Charlie Parker -
My craziest ideas come from cartoons. I approach music by taking that cartoon extreme and the real life extreme and finding somewhere in the middle. The animated element lures people in, but the real-life substance puts the nail in the coffin.
Busta Rhymes -
Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
James Weldon Johnson -
If anyone asks you what kind of music you play, tell him 'pop.' Don't tell him 'rock 'n' roll' or they won't even let you in the hotel.
Buddy Holly -
You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.
Art Blakey -
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 -
I know [canned music] makes chickens lay more eggs and factory workers produce more. But how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?
Victor Borge -
Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.
Joseph Addison -
I am severely distracted these days. It's hard to sit in front of the computer, uploading bad music for hours, when you have a wonderful boyfriend who treats you like a Goddess.
April Winchell -
The function of pop music is to be consumed.
Pierre Boulez -
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.
George Eliot -
Music-making as a means of getting money is hell
Gustav Holst -
It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'
John Cage -
The laws of morals and the laws of music are the same
Zoltan Kodaly -
Melody is a form of remembrance. It must have a quality of inevitability in our ears.
Gian Carlo Menotti -
Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
Thomas de Quincey -
Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.
John Lahr -
Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast."
William Congreve -
An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
Walter Bagehot -
To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life miracle to miracle.
Arthur Rubinstein -
I'm a fountain of blood. In the shape of a girl.
Bjork -
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle -
I'm from the Bob Wills and the Little Richard school of music. Bob Wills did what the hell he thought, Little Richard did what he thought, and those were my big influences.
Buck Owens -
History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it - as with these - life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.
Henry Steele Commager -
Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout.
Melvin Maddocks -
I never completed high school and I am very rich and very successful.
Tre Cool -
If you take the creation of music and the creation of your own life values as your overall goal, then living becomes a musical process.
Cecil Taylor -
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
Walter Savage Landor -
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
Jules Combarieu -
The high note is not the only thing.
Placido Domingo -
Music is another planet.
Alphonse Daudet -
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
Ralph Waldo Emerson -
The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.
Rabindranath Tagore -
Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.
Toru Takemitsu -
Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.
Eduard Hanslick -
Music and the arts feed our souls, but a decent wage puts food on the table. Musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations are a potent force to fight for social justice.
Tom Morello -
Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world.
Giuseppe Mazzini -
One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them.
Ira Gershwin -
Music has the power to bring people together like no other art form.
Michael Franti -
Yes, there are times when I get extremely depressed and how I sublimate those feelings is through music.
Peter Steele -
Rests always sound well.
Arnold Schoenberg -
Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.
Plutarch -
I just thank God I can make a living doing something I enjoy as much as I do playing music.
Charlie Daniels -
The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists.
Artur Schnabel -
A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.
Ernest Newman -
Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul
Plato -
When music and courtesy are better understood and appreciated, there will be no war.
Confucius -
Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.
Vance Packard -
There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.
Aaron Copland -
I think the future looks great for music, musicians, bass players, and all we love about music.
Billy Sheehan -
I listened to many different types of instruments and music, and have always tried to look at the bass as an instrument as opposed to only a bass.
Billy Sheehan -
I think I infuse the music with a new passion. Part of this is because I have fallen in love: I am in love with the New York Philharmonic. The chemistry has just been right. Beyond expectation.
Lorin Maazel -
I try to look at this music career thing as the means to an end. And really, at the end of it, I see myself on a sailboat, sailing off the edge of the world.
Michelle Shocked -
Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
Ludwig van Beethoven -
Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.
George Szell -
Fieldes have eies and woods have eares.
John Heywood -
Mathematics is the music of reason.
James Joseph Sylvester -
Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains
John Philip Sousa -
There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.
Pat Metheny -
I listen'd, motionless and still;And, as I mounted up the hill,The music in my heart I bore,Long after it was heard no more.
William Wordsworth -
It's one thing to just play a tune, or play a program of music, but it's another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did.
Chick Corea -
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Igor Stravinsky -
It's very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he's creating, the fact that he's experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we're in a brotherhood of some kind we're in it together.
Chick Corea -
Napster hijacked our music without asking. They never sought our permission. Our catalog of music simply became available as free downloads on the Napster system.
Lars Ulrich -
To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
James Whistler -
All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man
Bernard Berenson -
I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.
Benjamin Britten -
I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.
Peter Ustinov -
The public is like a piano. You just have to know what keys to poke.
Al Capp -
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
Aaron Copland -
God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
Arturo Toscanini -
Rock musicians, and a vast array of popular-music musicians, due to their wealth, acquired through the mass of their notoriety, are able to be listened to and heard and thus are able to effect change on an international level.
Bill Dixon -
When you are real in your music, people know it and they feel your authenticity.
Wynonna Judd -
The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other is by music.
Jonathan Edwards -
I have always loved the process of making the music, reading the letters from the fans who get married to my music, have children to my music and play my music at their funerals.
Wynonna Judd -
As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.
Debbie Allen -
The mountain music... is compelling music in its own right, harking back to a time when music was a part of everyday life and not something performed by celebrities.
Ethan Coen -
Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.
Howard Dietz -
I danced with passion to spite the music.
Gelsey Kirkland -
If you don't know what it is, don't mess with it.
Fats Waller -
Music, the mosaic of the air.
Andrew Marvell -
You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.
Beth Gibbons -
The human brain can soften as a result of incessant listening to music with an intent to commit prose.
Donal Henahan -
People listen to the music and sense what it is about. Sometimes they know exactly what the songs are about, sometimes they interpret their own meaning to the music, and thats great when this happens because it shows its striking a chord.
Enya -
We wanted to establish a new fan base over here. And second, we wanted to challenge ourselves. We wanted to bring what is ostensibly new music to fresh ears and see what lights them up.
Bob Weir -
Music should never be harmless.
Robbie Robertson -
Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.
Donal Henahan -
It was Chinese music. I couldnt understand it, but it had a good beat to it.
Ray Allen -
I enjoy all aspects of singing and I'm luckily given the choice to be part of different styles of music.
Bryn Terfel -
I would say that although my music may be or may have been part of the cultural background fabric of the gay community, I consider myself an outsider who belongs everywhere and nowhere... Being a human being is what truly counts. That's where you'll find me.
Annie Lennox -
Chamber music - a conversation between friends.
Catherine Drinker Bowen -
I'm so happy to be able to give kids the opportunity to learn about amazing world of dance and music that I've have been lucky enough to make such a big part of my own life.
Britney Spears -
Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
Frank Zappa -
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
Benny Green -
The music business was not safe, but it was FUN. It was like falling in love with a woman you know is bad for you, but you love every minute with her, anyway.
Lionel Richie -
The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.
Toru Takemitsu -
I never have a realistic sense of self. I either think everything I do is terrible and I'm the worst guy on the planet, or from time to time I'll think I'm the greatest gift to music and the coolest guy who ever lived, but that happens maybe an hour out of the week. Some days I'm more concerned with how my hair looks than what my guitar sounds like.
Dave Navarro -
I have always enjoyed different kinds of music.
Billy Sherwood -
Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke -
The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.
Heinrich Heine -
My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come.
Ravi Shankar -
The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.
Nadia Boulanger -
I hate music, especially when it's played.
Jimmy Durante -
There is a long history in country music of songs celebrating drinking and lamenting drinking. Country songs for the most part have always been heavily rooted in reality. The first artists were the people next door. They would sing on their porch or in their living room or at a barn dance. They sang about what they knew, and a lot of that was drinking.
Chet Atkins -
Bluegrass is wonderful music. I'm glad I originated it.
Bill Monroe -
When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.
Aaron Copland -
I am the eggman They are the eggmen! I am the walrus!
John Lennon -
Music is the medicine of the mind.
John Logan -
There is a great correlation between music and images.
Graham Nash -
I don't know why it is, but I just love soul music and all that old country stuff. I guess somehow my heart mixed them both together as I made my albums.
Billy Currington -
I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That's the point now isn't it?
Jeff Beck -
I was never interested in singing in the church choir or in school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.
Cassandra Wilson -
All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.
Billy Bragg -
My dad's music was a great inspiration to me.
Julian Lennon -
My love is new music, I tend to go and see a lot of bands, while [co-producer] Mark Cooper spends his time reading the press. It's often the new acts that strike a chord, because they aren't seen on other shows.
Jools Holland -
In the beginning, I was searching for myself in my music. My music was for me. I didn't have the mental room to be conscious of the listener; I wrote to save myself.
Ayumi Hamasaki -
Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.
Pietro Mascagni -
Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.
August Wilson -
The music comes first. When Geoff has made something the inspiration comes automatically. His music is very expressive. But still is is a very difficult process: I have to add something to his music, not push it away. It has to be equal, and I find that very difficult.
Beth Gibbons -
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.
Liam Gallagher -
Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.
Henri Frederic Amiel -
You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed?
Bryan Ferry -
One of the great things about rap music... it leaves a lot to be desired, as far as I'm concerned, musically, but I do recognize the very important place that it has in music and in creating role models for younger kids to emulate, giving them the dream that they can make it out of whatever situation they're in.
Graham Nash -
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
George Santayana -
Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.
Morton Feldman -
Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Pablo Casals -
Sport is an international phenomenon, like science or music.
Avery Brundage -
You're surrounded by electronic music in New York. I mean New York is one of the few places in North America where electronic music is the prevalent form.
Bob Mould -
Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.
Voltaire -
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
Samuel Johnson -
Music will save the world.
Pablo Casals -
[Commercial radio] is owned by one or two corporations now, and they're not in the music business. They're in the advertising business.... So let's not kid ourselves. If you want to hear music, go buy a guitar.
Elvis Costello -
Music is a form of prayer.
Toru Takemitsu -
I write music with an exclamation point!
Richard Wagner -
I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life.
Toru Takemitsu -
That song, for me, is about drugs and alcohol and loss and love. It's about being proud of who you are, being proud of your situation and just being stoked that things are always going to get better or always gonna get worse and that's such a great thing. Every day is a new surprise.
Bert McCracken -
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
Miles Davis -
Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.
Jacques Attali -
I've always been a fan of music where you can hear new things each time you listen.
Dave Navarro -
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
Colin Wilson -
I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.
Dizzy Gillespie -
The history of a people are found in its songs.
George Jellinek -
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
Noel Coward -
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.
Peter De Vries -
I loved music, but I found myself at the point where I wanted to die. I didn't care about life.
Brian Welch -
You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it.
Cecil Taylor -
Suffering is the price of being alive, and it is music and singing and art that has helped me live through some of the most difficult things that have happened to me.
Judy Collins -
Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke -
The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
Arthur Honegger -
The music is the main thing and it's just as easy to write acceptable words.
Bill Haley -
Do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid.
Robert Ashley -
True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
George Gershwin -
I've always felt that rock & roll was very, very wholesome.
Aretha Franklin -
Music fathoms the sky.
Charles Baudelaire -
If you really believe music is dangerous, you should let it go in one ear and out the other.
Jose Bergamin -
May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.
Frank Sinatra -
I could have a degree in music and come on the show, and Simon could still say 'You stink'.
Clay Aiken -
Anytime I get to be around the fans it's always a good time, especially during Music Fest. CMA puts together an event that allows artists to make that personal connection with the fans and it's wonderful. I look at it as our chance to give back to them and let them know we appreciate their support.
Billy Currington -
Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
John Erskine -
What passions cannot music raise or quell?
John Dryden -
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better.
Charles Burney -
There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.
Louis Armstrong -
For me, the backdrop of half the experiences of life includes music.
Amy Grant -
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.
James Weldon Johnson -
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.
Bob Dylan -
It is desirable that people make music on the breath, with the breath.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau -
If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.
Helen Keller -
Music springs from and is replenished by a hidden source which lies outside the world or reality. Music ever spoke to me of a mysterious world beyond, which moved my heart deeply and eloquently intimated its transcendental nature.
Bruno Walter -
I'm inspired by music. Sometimes more than I want to be.
Ben Savage -
If our music survives, which I have no doubt it will, then it will because it is good.
Jerry Goldsmith -
I was listening to music long before rock 'n roll.
Bill Wyman -
I'm saddest when I sing.
Thomas Haynes Bayly -
On the one hand it is said that the aim and object of music is to excite emotions, i.e., pleasurable emotions; on the other hand, the emotions are said to be the subject matter which musical works are intended to illustrate. Both propositions are alike in this, that one is as false as the other.
Eduard Hanslick -
Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.
Conrad Aiken -
This was work (music industry) but it was the awakening to what was to become a life's passion.
Clive Davis -
To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.
Cecil Taylor -
Music is the vernacular of the human soul
Geoffrey Latham -
Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
Lewis Thomas -
All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!
Yoko Ono -
Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise
Chuck Palahniuk -
Music inflames temperament.
Jim Morrison -
Rock music should be gross: that's the fun of it. It gets up and drops its trousers.
Bruce Dickinson -
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 -
When I was a little kid, I took tap and ballet. I've always loved to dance. I'm a rhythm machine.
Tommy Lee -
Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.
Gioacchino Rossini -
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
Jean Rhys -
Music is the balm that heals the forlorn ache of a distant star.
Don Williams, Jr -
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.
Angela Monet -
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
G K Chesterton -
For me to be able to reach out to other people throughout all this has been great, people want to hear from me and hear my music right now so it keeps me happy. I cherish every moment. I have a different perspective on everything now. In the end, I think it will make me a better person.
Will Allison -
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Laurie Anderson -
Jazz is the music of the body.
Anais Nin -
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
Ben Okri -
Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.
Frank Zappa -
Music is always a commentary on society.
Frank Zappa -
Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -
I still have a lot to learn - about the business, about music, and about myself. Its exciting.
Britney Spears -
Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
All the sounds of the earth are like music.
Oscar Hammerstein II -
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy -
Piracy is important to talk about. It's harming the music industry. It hurts all of us. The public needs to understand every time they buy a pirated CD, they hurt the industry. The only ones who can change that are the fans and the people that buy CDs. It's everybody's responsibility to prevent it.
Luis Miguel -
When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.
Edgar Watson Howe -
Pop is actually my least favorite kind of music, because it lacks real depth.
Christina Aguilera -
Oh my luve's like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June; Oh my luve's like the melodie That's sweetly played in tune.
Robert Burns -
The musician who always plays on the same string is laughed at.
Horace -
Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.
Nadia Boulanger -
I always like to get local music when I'm in another country.
April Winchell -
Propel, propel, propel your craft softly down liquid solution. Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, Existence is simply illusion.
Fred Rogers -
I've outdone anyone you can name - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
James Brown -
I was determined to carve out a music of my own. I didn't want to copy anybody.
Bill Monroe -
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge -
There are wonderful things in real jazz, the talent for improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
Henri Matisse -
I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.
Igor Stravinsky -
A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.
Mariah Carey -
[Rubinstein was] a fountain from which music spouted, not a recitalist.
Donal Henahan -
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings
Ed Gardner -
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Igor Stravinsky -
That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit for any intellectual effort goes without saying.
Eduard Hanslick -
There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead
Arthur Honegger -
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
Allan Bloom -
A lot of music you might listen to is pretty vapid, it doesn't always deal with our deeper issues. These are the things I'm interested in now, particularly at my age.
Annie Lennox -
It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.
Hilaire Belloc -
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
Abraham Maslow -
I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.
Cecil Taylor -
Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.
George Eliot -
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
Lawrence Durrell -
I think all the boys that write the screaming stuff would write the best love songs... because they have the most to hide. The guys that are in the most pain are usually the ones with the biggest hearts.
Tori Amos -
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H. L. Mencken -
I don't believe in having bands for solo records.
Mick Jagger -
I am moved by music, and certain things just make my day.
Bobby Sherman -
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain -
Punk is just as much a form of folk music as anything is!
Michelle Shocked -
Making music should not be left to the professionals.
Michelle Shocked -
It's not music, it's a disease. (on rock'n'roll)
Mitch Miller -
If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music. I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it. And I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit.
Tori Amos -
Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.
Morton Feldman -
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
Brian Eno