Music Quotes and Sayings
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celebrating 14 years online 1998-2012
Quotations about Music
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski Music is an outburst of the soul. ~Frederick Delius Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886 Music is what life sounds like. ~Eric Olson If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. ~John Cage Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song. ~Louis Armstrong Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine There is in souls a sympathy with sounds: And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave; Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies. ~William Cowper When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine Truly to sing, that is a different breath. ~Rainer Maria Rilke Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. ~Anais Nin There is no truer truth obtainable By Man than comes of music. ~Robert Browning Strong lager and some early Zep tunes. I ask thee, is there a better way to spend an evening? ~Author Unknown Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific. ~Aaron Copland What passion cannot music raise and quell! ~John Dryden The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial. ~Leonard Bernstein Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. ~Paul Simon Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory - ~Percy Bysshe Shelley A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel The pause is as important as the note. ~Truman Fisher The city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built forever. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country. ~Edmund G. Brown Music can noble hints impart, Engender fury, kindle love, With unsuspected eloquence can move, And manage all the man with secret art. ~Joseph Addison My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle. ~Liberace Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music. ~Ronald Reagan The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life… the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril. ~Richard Baker Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains. ~John Philip Sousa Music is the medicine of the breaking heart. ~Leigh Hunt Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Comments of Abe Martin and His Neighbors, 1923 Country music is three chords and the truth. ~Harlan Howard An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like. From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts. ~Kit Coleman, Kit Coleman: Queen of Hearts I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar? ~Percy Bysshe Shelley Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it? ~Charles Ives The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic. ~Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz A man's screech should exceed his rasp, or what's a violin for? ~Stuart Rogers After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de LaPrade Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it. ~Dave Barry Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker. ~William Green If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. ~Simon Rattle Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all. ~Helmut Walcha I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief. ~S.A. Sachs Music is well said to be the speech of angels. ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays, "The Opera" Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. ~Robert Benchley The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera. ~Dave Barry No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. ~W.H. Auden, Time, 29 December 1961
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