166 quotes about Music



Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.
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Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
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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.
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What we play is life.
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There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.
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Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
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I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.
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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.
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The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
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Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.
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A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.
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She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.
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Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
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Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.
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Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.
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Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.
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Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.
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Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.
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It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
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We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.
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I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
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I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.
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It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
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It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.
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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.
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A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.
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If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
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One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
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Song is the heroics of speech.
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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.
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It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.
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Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.
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Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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Music has charms to soothe the savage beast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
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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.
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Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
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Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
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Good music is very close to primitive language.
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Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.
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The high note is not the only thing.
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Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
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Music is only love looking for words.
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Mozart is sweet sunshine.
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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.
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You are the music while the music lasts.
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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.
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Music causes us to think eloquently.
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Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
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I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.
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Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.
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Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings.
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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.
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True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
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Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.
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A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.
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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.
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Your talking to someone who really understands rock music.
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I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.
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A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
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When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.
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Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.
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Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.
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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.
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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.
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Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.
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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.
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Country music is three chords and the truth.
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Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
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Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent
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Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.
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After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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I was a veteran before I was a teenager.
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The history of a people is found in its songs.
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I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.
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It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.
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Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.
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It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
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