Music Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

For me the music is a vehicle for my lyrics. It's a chance to get some really good words across.

Really good music isn't just to be heard, you know?
It's almost like a hallucination

Except for a couple of hours in the morning which I passed in the company of a sage I stayed in bed without food only a few mouthfuls of water you are a fine looking old man I said to myself in the mirror and what is more you have the correct attitude You don't care if it ends or if it goes on And as for the women and the music there will be plenty of that in Paradise Then I went to the Mosque of Memory to express my gratitude

I wanted to write joyful music that made other people feel good. That's what I tried to do for the past 27 years.

I don't understand why people think it's so difficult to learn to play guitar. I found it incredibly easy. You just pick a chord, go twang, and you've got music.

Germany appeared in my eyes a very tiny portion of the earth. I had emerged from abstract Mysticism, and I learnt a love for Matter. Beauty of material and brilliancy of wit were lordly things to me: as regards my beloved music, I found them both among the Frenchmen and Italians. I forswore my model, Beethoven; his last Symphony I deemed the keystone of a whole great epoch of art, beyond whose limits no man could hope to press, and within which no man could attain to independence.

That's why I do this music business thing, it's communication with people without having the extreme inconvenience of actually phoning anybody up.

My area of research is something that in all fairness has no practical usability whatsoever and the thing is I'm often asked to apologize for that. It is interesting to me that people ask 'what's the point of doing that if it's not useful?' But they never ask that, or do they very rarely ask that about art or literature or music. Those things are not gonna produce a better toaster.

Lawrence M. Krauss

Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.

There are three things that I have always loved and have never understood: Painting, Music, and Woman.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

The music reached us. Clumsily,
stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves
in answer,
we moved, we followed.

Denise Levertov

Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture — a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.

I want to grow as an artist and I'm taking a step out, I want my music to mature.

The ascetic Gotama … avoids watching dancing, singing, music and shows. He abstains from using garlands, perfumes, cosmetics, ornaments and adornments. … He refrains from running errands, from buying and selling.

Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are essentially shopkeepers and nothing else.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

I don't want to hear music, I don't want the sunrise to be pink. The world is a liar. Its ugliness is overwhelming; the scraps of beauty make it worse.

On being asked if there might be a future for nude dancing:

No. You see there are portions of the human anatomy which would keep swinging after the music had finished.

Robert Helpmann

One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about

The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them... I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.

We can never rely on inspiration. Making music is actually little less than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion.

George Gershwin

When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head.

Maryanne Amacher

Letter to Camille Pleyel:

My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos... in this respect this is a savage country.

Frédéric Chopin

Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, it's based on improvisation and spontaneity.