Famous Quotes About Music By Reference

(85 Items) A great collection of quotes about Music. Quotations are arranged alphabetically and can be sorted by any header. This list of Music sayings and quotes includes the sources and authors of the Music quotes when possible. We hope you find this list of quotations about the topic Music useful as a reference list or informative as you surf the web, and you can find many other lists of quotes about subjects on Ranker. You can use the items in this list to create a new list, re-rank it to fit your opinion, then share it with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers or with any other social networks you use on a regular basis.

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1

"A man sitting monkey-like on the rooftop of his brain is due the applause such feats earn him. "

Aberjhani

Jazz, Music, Genius, Psychological egoism, Talent, Creative Performance More
2

'Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean, to be entreated, either to begin or end.

Ben Jonson

Music
3

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

W. H. Auden

Music
4

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

Music
5

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

Music
6

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Miguel de Cervantes

Music
7

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Jean Cocteau

Music
8

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Music
9

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Elbert Hubbard

Music
10

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Samuel Johnson

Music
11

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Noël Coward

Music
12

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

Music
13

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Denis Diderot

Music
14

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 fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Albert Einstein

Music
15

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

John Keats

Music
16

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

William Wordsworth

Music
17

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

George Bernard Shaw

Music
18

I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.

Havelock Ellis

Music
19

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hermann Hesse

Music
20

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Martin Luther

Music
21

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 Nixon

Music
22

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

John Lennon

Music
23

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.

Stendhal

Music
24

If music be the food of love; play on.

William Shakespeare

Music
25

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

Oscar Wilde

Music
26

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Thomas Carlyle

Music
27

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

William Shakespeare

Music
28

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

Music
29

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Samuel Johnson

Music
30

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
31

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

Plutarch

Music
32

Michael Jackson National African American Art Examiner Series

Aberjhani

Michael Jackson, Music, Philanthropy, Fame, Genius, Creativity, The Jacksons More
33

Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Music
34

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

Samuel Pepys

Music
35

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Music
36

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Victor Hugo

Music
37

Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

William Congreve

Music
38

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Josh Billings

Music
39

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Henry Miller

Music
40

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

George Santayana

Music
41

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

Baruch Spinoza

Music
42

Music is only love looking for words.

Lawrence Durrell

Music
43

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Christian Nevell Bovee

Music
44

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Music
45

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

Plato

Music
46

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

Emil Cioran

Music
47

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Leo Tolstoy

Music
48

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Thomas Carlyle

Music
49

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Music
50

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Music
51

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Lawrence Durrell

Music
52

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

John Ruskin

Music
53

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

Music
54

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Joseph Addison

Music
55

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Martin Luther

Music
56

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Joseph Addison

Music
57

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
58

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

Music
59

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Thomas Carlyle

Music
60

Only sick music makes money today.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Music
61

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music
62

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

Music
63

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Max Beerbohm

Music
64

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Music
65

Song is the heroics of speech.

Thomas Carlyle

Music
66

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

John Milton

Music
67

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.

Music
68

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

Music
69

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Music
70

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

Music
71

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Music
72

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

Music
73

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

H. L. Mencken

Music
74

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

Henry David Thoreau

Music
75

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

Mark Twain

Music
76

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Thomas Mann

Music
77

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

Music
78

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

Music
79

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

Music
80

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

Music
81

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Music
82

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

Music
83

You are the music while the music lasts.

T. S. Eliot

Music
84

“However the world community chooses to interpret it, where Michael Jackson himself is concerned, if the purpose of a legacy is to help make the world a richer, more fulfilling, and more humane place than it was during one’s lifetime, he can rest in peace knowing he did exactly that.” --from Michael Jackson, Legacies of a Globetrotting Moonwalking Philanthropist

Aberjhani

African American, Michael Jackson, Music, Philanthropy, World community More
85

“Summer is the season when the sun reaches its zenith, its peak, when it burns the hottest and shines most golden for the longest days of the year. During this period, it embraces everything with its light, spreads a blanket of reassuring warmth, induces fertility and growth and regeneration, and even causes rainstorms to balance its own overwhelming power. Michael Jackson was very much like that with an abundance of creative spiritual energies that enriched, inspired, and empowered the lives of more human beings than anyone can accurately count.” --from Michael Jackson and Summertime from This Point On

Aberjhani

Michael Jackson, Music, Journalism, The Year 2010, Mainstream media, Life and Death, Michael Jackson Birthday Tribute More

Showing items 1 - 25 of 85

Famous Quotes About Music you can use this list to help make your own ranked list about this topic

"A man sitting monkey-like on the rooftop of his brain is due the applause such feats earn him. "

'Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean, to be entreated, either to begin or end.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

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.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

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

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

I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

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.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

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.

If music be the food of love; play on.

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

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

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

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

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.

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

Michael Jackson National African American Art Examiner Series

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

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

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

Music is only love looking for words.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

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

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

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

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.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

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.

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.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Only sick music makes money today.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

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.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

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.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

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.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

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

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

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

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

You are the music while the music lasts.