“Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.”

Conversations (January 1804)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Jan. 26, 2025. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear." by Ludwig Van Beethoven?
Ludwig Van Beethoven photo
Ludwig Van Beethoven 43
German Romantic composer 1770–1827

Related quotes

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël photo

“The sight of such a monument is like continual and stationary music, which one hears for one's good as one approaches it.”

La vue d'un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée, qui vous attend pour vous faire du bien quand vous vous en approchez.
Bk. 4, ch. 3
The idea that "architecture is frozen music" — an aphorism of disputed origin sometimes misattributed to de Staël — is found in a number of German writers of the period.
Corinne (1807)

“I could hear the band playing a cheery sort of music. I don’t like jazz music as a rule, but I was glad to hear it that night. I think it helped us all.”

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 143

Frédéric Chopin photo

“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 (1810–1849) Polish composer

Letter to Camille Pleyel.
Context: 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.

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Misattributed
First recorded appearance: Germaine de Staël's On Germany (1813). ". . . sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane." There are several other pre-Nietzsche examples, indicating that the phrase was widespread in the nineteenth-century; it was referred to in 1927 as an "old proverb".

Oscar Wilde photo
Conrad Aiken photo
Edward Gorey photo
Ron English photo

“In heaven, no one can hear you dream.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

Henry Rollins photo
Marvin Minsky photo

“Hearing music is like viewing scenery and… when we hear good music our minds react in very much the same way they do when we see things.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Related topics