Quotes about music

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

— Van Morrison

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

— Theodore Mungers

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

— Richard Neville

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

— Ernest Newman

Only sick music makes money today.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Without music, life would be a mistake.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

— Richard M. Nixon

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

— Bill Nye

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

— Vance Packard

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

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

— Walter Pater

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

— Luciano Pavarotti

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

— Samuel Pepys

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

— Plato

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.

— Plato

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

— Plutarch

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.

— Ezra Pound

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.

— Ezra Pound

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

— Elvis Presley

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

— Zimbabwe Proverb

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

— Bonnie Raitt

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

— Simon Rattle

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

— Kevin Richardson

Music should never be harmless.

— Robbie Robertson

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

— Gioacchino Antonio Rossini

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

— John Ruskin

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

— George Santayana

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

— Artur Schnabel

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

— Robert Schumann

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

— Robert Schumann

Music is the key to the female heart.

— Johann G. Seume

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

— William Shakespeare

Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?

— William Shakespeare

If music be the food of love; play on.

— William Shakespeare

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

— George Bernard Shaw

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

— John Philip Sousa

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

— Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

— Ringo Starr

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.

— George Steiner

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.

— Henri B. Stendhal

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.

— Wallace Stevens

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

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

— Igor Stravinsky

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

— Igor Stravinsky

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

— George Szell

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

— Jeffrey Tate

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

— James Taylor

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

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

— Henry David Thoreau

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

— Count Leo Tolstoy

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

— Mark Twain

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

— Rebecca West

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

— Paul Whiteman

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

— Oscar Wilde

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

— Oscar Wilde

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

— Oscar Wilde

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

— Colin Wilson

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

— Arthur Winter

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.

— Ron Wood

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

— William Wordsworth

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

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

— Frank Zappa

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.

— Frank Zappa

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

— Frank Zappa

Music is the universal language: it is the same anywhere you go in the world.

— Anonymous

People just continue to jack&rob styles, from fashion, to art, to music & quotes, respect the orgin & don't fake it 2 make it, Jackie Robinson

— Authentic James

Rap is to cool for me

— BPBEE

Good music feeds your soul, bad music tear's a hole. Any genre fits it's just what you make of it.

— Jvongard

music comes in different ways punk, jazz, rock, hip hop, country, and more more styles and there is always one style made just for you

— anime