Quotes about music
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“I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Love, Thinking

“Any piece of good music is in essence a love song.”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Love

“Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Color

“Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Water, Singing

“Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.”

Pablo Casals (1876–1973) Catalan cellist and conductor

Love, Books, Way, Understanding

“Colour is the touch of the eye,
Music to the deaf,
A word out of darkness.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning… except its own.”

Leonard Bernstein book The Joy of Music

Source: The Joy of Music

Art, Star

“Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Art, Literature, Science

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Strong Opinions

"Foreword", p. 3.
Source: Strong Opinions (1973)

Pleasure, Stupidity

“See the music, hear the dance.”

George Balanchine (1904–1983) Georgian choreographer, dancer and ballet master (1904-1983)

Dance

“Dont speak of tomorrow. Let the music speak to us tonight, in a happier language than ours.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Variant: Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
Source: The Woman in White

“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Way

“There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.”

Terry Pratchett book Soul Music

Source: Soul Music

Forgetting

“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Love, Art, Nature, Beauty

“The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Interview on London Plus (24 September 1984) - YouTube video http://youtube.com/watch?v=CR2N040drg0

World, Business

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Star, Dance

“… All the shops have been smashed open. There was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?"

"Yeah," said Rincewind. "… Luters, I expect.”

Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic

Source: The Light Fantastic

People, Help

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

Silence, Painting

“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”

William Shakespeare Twelfth Night

Source: Twelfth Night

Love, Food, Romantic, For Him

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

World, Hope, Way, Feeling

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Dance

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

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Life, Art

“Lady Madonna lying on the bed
Listen to the music playing in your head.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

Lying

“It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

Feeling, Appearance

“Keep time! How sour sweet music is when time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives. I wasted time and now doth time waste me.”

William Shakespeare Richard II

Source: Richard II

Men, Time

“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Love, People, Books, Reading

“Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Fountain Overflows

Life

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

from: Joan Miro: Selected Writings and Interviews, M.Rowell, Thames and Hudson, 1987
1940 - 1960

Color

“This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist

Peaceful

“But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Source: The Glass Menagerie

World, Sex, Dance

“There is no such thing as happy music.”

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) Austrian composer

Happiness

“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“I am the maker of music, the dreamer of dreams!”

Roald Dahl book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Variant: We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
Source: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Dreams

“I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

Thinking, Sense

“It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Life, Hope

“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”

Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature

Source: The Great God Brown and Other Plays

Love, Life, Beauty, Color

“Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

People, Business, Thinking

“All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

People

“Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: One Way Street And Other Writings

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Book of Rites

Pleasure, Nature

“But this didn'tlike magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt like music.”

Terry Pratchett book Soul Music

Source: Soul Music

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Sleep, Night

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”

Victor Hugo book William Shakespeare

Ce qu’on ne peut dire et ce qu’on ne peut taire, la musique l’exprime.
Part I, Book II, Chapter IV
William Shakespeare (1864)
Variant: Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent
Source: Hugo's Works: William Shakespeare

“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 Stray Birds

Source: Stray Birds

Dance

“Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.”

William Shakespeare book Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Much Ado About Nothing

“Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Disease, Problem

“Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.”

Ernest J. Gaines (1933–2019) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

Life, Books

“It is my soul that calls upon my name;
How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
like softest music to attending ears!
-Romeo”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Soul, Lovers, Night

“In music the passions enjoy themselves.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

Passion

“She thought to herself, "This is now." She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder book Little House in the Big Woods

Source: Little House in the Big Woods

Time, Housing

“It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

People, Education, Way

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

World, Beauty, Feeling

“Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Feeling

“What's the earth
With all its art, verse, music, worth —
Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Love, Art

“Life is one grand sweet song so start the music”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Life

“Because some stories end, but old stories go on, and you gotta dance to the music if you want to stay ahead”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Dance

“Only sick music makes money today.”

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

Money

“Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.”

Mark Twain book Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Source: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Clothes

“If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary.”

Robert Schumann (1810–1856) German composer, aesthete and influential music critic

“If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Algernon, Act I.
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Context: Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

People

“I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

People, Time

“Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Books, Reading, Country

“I sit, I read, I listen to music, I go or a walk, I ride to Prospect Park and sit under the Willow Tree, I remember, I forget, I look at pictures, I do, I do, I do… or I don't, but its peaceful… only me… no worries.”

Hubert Selby Jr. (1928–2004) American writer

Peace, Tree, Reading, Forgetting

“Come oh come ye tea-thirsty restless ones -- the kettle boils, bubbles and sings, musically.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore

Singing, Tea

“Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

People

“Music is only love looking for words.”

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer

Love

“Music is love in search of a word.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Love, Search

“the only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats…”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Life, Cats

“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician

Soul

“Music and comedy are so linked. The rhythm of comedy is connected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.”

Conan O'Brien (1963) American television show host and comedian

“He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain

People, World

“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..”

Pablo Casals (1876–1973) Catalan cellist and conductor

Beauty, Way, Heart

“If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Art

“Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Life, Dance

“Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Art, Tear, Memory

“When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.”

William Shakespeare Henry V

Source: Henry V

Singing

“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.”

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor

Time

“We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Understanding, Thinking

“Music is an addiction.”

Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician

“If you learn music you'll learn most all there is to know.”

Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) Purported clairvoyant healer and psychic

Learning

“Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 10
Atticus Finch & Maudie Atkinson
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Context: "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
“Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

People, Singing, Heart

“yeah me see myself as a revolutionary, would wouldn't want no help and imma take no bribe from no one and fight it single handed with music”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Help, Fight

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Life, People, World, Beauty

“Music not only saved my life, it gave me a life”

Nick Carter (1980) singer from the United States

Life

“If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Source: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“… the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.”

Michio Kaku (1947) American theoretical physicist, futurist and author

Source: Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

God

“I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.”

Eric Clapton (1945) English musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist

God, Art, Way, Learning

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

Among School Children http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1437/, st. 8 The Tower (1928) Context: Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul. Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Dance

“It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.”

Terry Pratchett book Soul Music

Source: Soul Music

Sadness, Universe

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

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Source: Quatrevingt-Treize

Flowers, Nature, Suffering

“I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

From a personal conversation, quoted from memory by Maxim Gorky in "V.I. Lenin" (1924) http://www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/1924/01/x01.htm  Attributions Context: I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devillishly difficult job!

People, Stupidity, Beauty, Hell