Music Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Whiskey and music, I reflected, especially when taken together, made time fly incredibly fast.

For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty – statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

Charles Krauthammer

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.

It's funny. People come to my house because I was recommended to them to do some writing. They've never heard of me, and you can see the reticence written all over their faces. Then they look at the walls and see the platinum and gold albums and they say, "Oh. That one's from Prince! That's from Robert Palmer! Oh my God, Paul McCartney!" And then they say, "You're a really fine composer"—without having heard any of my music.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

Alan Hollinghurst

If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it till you got it right.

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.

Wow, Kylie muttered, and grinned. Yeah, wow. Della leaned in closer. I think Perry just grew a pair. Kylie bit down on her lip to keep from laughing. If this was a movie, there would be some music playing in the background. I could sing, Della chuckled. And ruin it, Kylie teased back. I've heard you singing in the shower. Both grinning, they looked back at the kissing couple.

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.

A musical audience is at best uninspiring, at worst definitely drab.... Respectability hangs like a pall over the orchestra and the boxes; a sort of sterile sobriety ill-fitted to the passionate geometry of music.

I was the first woman ever named Entertainer of the Year in country music.

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

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

William Butler Yeats

John Cage said that music is the moral evaluation of sound. We might generalize his remark: when we speak of art, we make a moral evaluation of the relative worth of the various contributions to a work. It is no surprise that many of the participants differ with more conventional evaluations and rank their own contributions as more important than that of the artist as conventionally defined.

Howard S. Becker

When Music, heavenly maid, was young,
While yet in early Greece she sung.

William Collins

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

I've no regrets in my personal and professional life. Being a spiritual person, I believe whatever happens, happens for the good. I simply follow what dad says, 'With music, you can reach out and spread happiness.'

Yuvan Shankar Raja

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.

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn't live with it—even of my own music—with the same nuances forever.

Nevertheless, music will not acknowledge a context greater than itself—social, cultural, or biographical—to which it is conveniently subservient. To paraphrase Goethe's grandiose warning to the scientist: do not look behind the notes, they themselves are the doctrine.

It makes sweet human music, — oh! the spells that haunt the trembling tale a bright-eyed maiden tells!

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

Charles Baudelaire

I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches. Have you ever heard the earth breathe?

To this fine spirit our earth owes her greatest:
For the future is purchased by scorning the present,
And life is redeemed from its clay soil by fame.
* King, not a vestige remains of your palaces;
Conqueror, forgotten the fame of your battles:
But the Poet yet lives in the sweetness of music—
He appeal'd to the heart, that never forgets.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon