MUSIC QUOTES
quotations about music
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. At other times one is conscious of carrying a weight.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Mill on the Floss
Creating music implies the desire to give.
LUCIANO BERIO
"Music Is Not a Solitary Act", Tempo, January 1997
Well, one of the things that hits have and that great music always has, you know--the music feels like it was already there.
BONO
Oprah Magazine, Apr. 2004
When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
As I play the game of life
I try to make it better each and every day.
And when I struggle in the night
The magic of the music seems to light the way.
JOHN LENNON
Intuition
That's one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they'll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.
DAVE GROHL
"Twenty years after In Utero, The Guardian, August 31, 2013
The purpose of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.
ANONYMOUS
What passion cannot Music raise and quell?
JOHN DRYDEN
St. Cecilia's Day
The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world.
ALEX ROSS
Listen to This
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
MAYA ANGELOU
attributed, Women Know Everything!
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Music at Night and Other Essays
Music, once admitted to the soul becomes ... a sort of spirit, and never dies. It wanders perturbedly through the halls and galleries of the memory.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
Zanoni
Music is essentially twelve notes between any octave. Twelve notes, and the octave repeats. It's the same story, told over and over, forever. All any artist can offer the world is how they see those twelve notes. That's it.
ERIC ROTH & BRADLEY COOPER
A Star Is Born
Music is music, ultimately. If it makes you feel good, cool.
PRINCE
MTV interview with Sway Calloway
It is one thing to get all the notes right; any number of unsocialized conservatory prodigies can do that. It is another thing to play the thoughts within the notes, the light around them, the darkness behind them, the silence at the end of the phrase. That is what inspires awe.
ALEX ROSS
"The Art of Fantasy", The New Yorker, Mar. 17, 2003
The ear has to be educated if one wishes to appreciate musical sounds, just as the eyes must learn to distinguish the value of words.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.
ROGER SCRUTON
Understanding Music
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation. Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound.
KABIR
Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.
WILLIAM CONGREVE
The Mourning Bride
Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
KINGSLEY AMIS
The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction