Music Quotes

Silence is more musical than any song.

Christina Rossetti

Music... can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein

No Voice; but oh! the silence sank like music on my heart.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My loathings are simple stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Vladimir Nabokov

Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

Henry Ward Beeche

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

George Gordon Byron

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything.

Plato

Those who danced where thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.

Angela Mont

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Geoffrey Latham

From the persistence of noise comes the insistence of rage. From the emergence of tone comes the divergence of thought. From the enlightenment of music comes the wisdom of... silence.

Visions of Gregorian Chants

For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and 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, Charles Bovary

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Music is Love in search of a word.

Sidney Lanie

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

Michel de Montaigne

Those who dance were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.

Angela Monet

Rap music... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.

Tom Robbins

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten imparting grace.

Plato

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

Roald Dahl

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DOE Unbearably lovely music is heard as the curtain rises, and we see the woods on a summer afternoon. A fawn dances on and nibbles slowly at some leaves. He drifts lazily through the soft foliage. Soon he starts coughing and drops dead.

Woody Allen, Without Feathers

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Richard Milhous Nixon

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause and say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thompson

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luthe

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

There are more bad musicians than there is bad music.

Isaac Stern

Life without music would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie.

Agnes de Mille

Aunt Marion was right... Never marry a musician, and never answer the door.

Charlie Brown, Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz

Number is the Word but is not utterance it is wave and light, though no one sees it it is rhythm and music, though no one hears it. Its variations are limitless and yet it is immutable. Each form of life is a particular reverberation of Number.

Maurice Druon

Good music is good music, and everything else can go to hell.

Dave Matthews, VH1 Special: Trey And Dave Go To Africa

I always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Aretha Franklin

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Georges Clemenceau

I wish you music to help with the burdens of life, and to help you release your happiness to others.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music... Bodies never lie.

Agnes De Mille

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana, Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Leo Tolstoy