Music Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Music is the one thing in which there is no use trying to deceive others or make false pretenses.

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

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

Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significance of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young.

So is music an asylum. It takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I haven't a single friend; I must live alone. But well I know that God is nearer to me than to the others of my art; I associate with Him without fear, I have always recognized and understood Him, and I have no fear for my music,-it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it must become free from all the miseries that the others drag with them.

Ludwig van Beethoven

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

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.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty.

Tityrus, you who lie under cover of the spreading beech-tree, you are practising your pastoral music on a thin stalk.

Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see…So the fantasy corners of America…you've pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you've custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.

We rarely hear the inward music, but we're all dancing to it nevertheless.

Of music Dr Johnson used to say that it was the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.

Give me some music—music, moody food
Of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

But we have higher mathematics, haven't we? This gives me freedom from my senses. The language of mathematics is even more inborn and universal than the language of music; a mathematical formula is crystal clear and independent of all sense organs. I therefore built a mathematical laboratory, set myself in it as if I were sitting in a car, and moved along with a beam of light.

Albert Einstein

Music, verily, is the mediator between the life of the mind and the senses.

Variant translation: Music is indeed the mediator between the spiritual and sensual life.

Ludwig van Beethoven

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

The art of producing good music from a cultivated voice can be achieved by many, but the art of producing that music from the harmony of a pure life is achieved very rarely.