Music Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury, and my passion,
With its sweet air.

William Shakespeare

We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.

The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world?

Henry David Thoreau

He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I couldn't wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand.

Charles Dickens

Your body is the harp of your soul and it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul

Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me.

Vincent van Gogh

There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears; The earth is but the music of the spheres.

Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?

There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium's capital had gather'd then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men.
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell.
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

The sea is like music. It has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over.

'Don't you worry, and don't you hurry.' I know that phrase by heart, and if all other music should perish out of the world it would still sing to me.

Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.

How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears!

William Shakespeare

For words are wearisome and worn, while the arabesques of music are forever new.

Music for entertainment... seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.

Theodor W. Adorno

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

Music oft hath such a charm
To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.

William Shakespeare

Let a man be stimulated by poetry, established by the rules of propriety, and perfected by music.

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.

Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself.... Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

My day is done, and I am like a boat drawn on the beach, listening to the dance-music of the tide in the evening.

Rabindranath Tagore