Music Quotes

• It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites--opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity--where energies flow smoothly in one direction--there will be much doing but no music. - Eric Hoffer
• [Music] takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later. - Allan Bloom
• Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. -- Robert Browning
• 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
• Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong. -- Harriet Henry Ward Beecher Stowe
• Tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes. -- Beethoven
• 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. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
• "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
• "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
• "It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, & everlasting beauty of monotony." -- Benjamin Britten
• "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
• "A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become." -- W. H. Auden
• "Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory." -- Sir Thomas Beecham
• " I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to." -- Elvis Presley
• "Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule." -- Samuel Butler
• "Military justice is to justice what military music is to music." -- Groucho Marx
• "Music is the art of thinking with sounds." -- Jules Combarieu
• "Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays." -- Oscar Wilde
• "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
• "Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." -- Igor Stravinsky
• "Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." -- Voltaire
• There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem." -- George Bernard Shaw
• "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." -- Mark Twain
• "There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between." -- Sir Thomas Beecham
• "Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth." -- Ludwig Van Beethoven
• "I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500." -- James Brown
• "Without music, life is a journey through a desert." -- Pat Conroy
• "A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges." -- Benny Green
• "If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing." -- Zimbabwe Proverb
• "There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another." -- Frank