Music Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We are as the flute, and the music in us is from thee; we are as the mountain and the echo in us is from thee.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd 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

Give me mine angle, we'll to th' river: there, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny-finned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up, I'll think them every one an Antony, And say, 'Ah, ha! are caught!'

William Shakespeare

When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.

Henry David Thoreau

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.

Albert Einstein

Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze by the sweet power of music.

William Shakespeare

It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won't chime.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I who am blind can give one hint to those who see - one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides.

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.

Rabindranath Tagore

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.

Arthur Schopenhauer

We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times.

Henry David Thoreau

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Music] a pederast might hum when raping a choirboy.

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond —
Invisible, as Music —
But positive, as Sound.

Emily Dickinson

What I really want from Music: That it be cheerful and profound like an afternoon in October...

Friedrich Nietzsche